Glove Money

There is a lushness to these poems, monologues extended and compact, propelled and performative, offering gestures, agency and an urgency that feels more forceful, even grounded, through being spoken in hushed tones… Pay attention to Sophia Dahlin: this collection really is something glorious to behold.

Dahlin traverses sapphic lust-spaces and invisible geographies of yearning, positioning the reader within the force-of-the-yearn. Some of these invisible geographies trace the floral planes and seas Sappho might have seen, oceansides, triangles, the space between lovers on the phone; others are more grounded—New York, Oakland, the streets of Berkeley, “school,” the Midwest, the airport… and, most crucially, the lesbian potential for gender expansion.

Sometimes a book appears so inventive and certain it’s confounding to think the world ever existed before it did.

Lovechild of a polyamorous poetic parentage—Sappho, Diane di Prima, Robert Frost, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, and Anne Carson, among others—Sophia Dahlin writes poems of unabashed sexuality and a voracious, often audacious engagement with the physical world, from space heaters to dahlias.

In our profound social detachment, poetry can reveal the urging to possess and become involved in one’s own life, whilst aware of the intrinsic chaos of attempting meaningful involvement when society is increasingly detaching. Whilst this remains a modern problem, we’ve always considered the individuals dilemma of separation (from the whole) and urge to meaning. . . . Dahlin translates senses through words, homage and acute sensitivity to our greater human mythology.