I felt pretty lukewarm about this particular collection. I'm not sure if I read it at the wrong time, and didn't get all that I could have out of it. I went in so excited and engaged nut ultimately found these poems forgetful.

“Our own desire // to speak into a new atmosphere” from “Horizon”







The title of Door is, of course, an invitation of sorts, to come through that door and find what might be waiting—romance or clouds or children or anything else Lauterbach conjures throughout the course of this full-length collection.

In “Fable of the Barn,” Lauterbach writes. “This adventure hurts my heart, someone / said uneasily”—and the adventures here may hurt yours, as well. But what doesn’t hurt—where Lauterbach’s great strength lies—is the economy of her words.

She utilizes short lines and pointed words that don’t allow for ambiguity, or when they do, you still understand her, whether in her long poems such as the 11-section “Door [The Said closes],” her breathless poems such as “Fragment (Stone),” or her grimmest moods such as in “Nights in the Asyntactical World.”

If Lauterbach’s goal is to satisfy “our own desire // to speak into a new atmosphere,” as she writes in “Horizon,” I think that she has done so.