Glove Money (Nightboat, forthcoming 2025)
Buy Glove Money from Nightboat, or your local independent bookstore
Praise for Glove Money
A hymn to perversity, a lyric pledge to desire and risk, Glove Money pages through the canon to “seed its sugar in your dreams.” In this joyful and irreverent exploration of the role of poet-as lover, Sophia Dahlin plays Sappho, O’Hara, romantics and troubadours, assembling a self seaworthy of romance. With humor and a light touch, Glove Money dismisses bioessentialist gatekeeping and expands the lesbian imaginary.
“Glove Money, with its strategies of joy, situates Sophia Dahlin in a lineage of writers, from Wordsworth to O’Hara, who have regarded the “duty to be happy” as the poet’s highest obligation to the affirmation of life. Dahlin’s exuberance is dauntless—refusing at each turn the ambivalence which has accompanied contemporary affect as it's been inscribed by private experience and models of scarcity. For here, hospitality triumphs: a Steinian spread of shareable delights, Glove Money celebrates friends and lovers, inventing a queer American pastoral whose Sapphic brilliance and subversion lie in just how easily the misbehaved and warmly weird go down. What's more, Dahlin leverages the bubbly, the naive, the homey, the coquettish, and the giddy to give them their proper aesthetic and political place—an erotics-poetics of irresistibility as resistance.” –Jennifer Soong
“Glove Money makes me proud of my weakness. Or maybe I remember that when desire shakes my resolve to hold back pain and risk it all for touch and love and bread, that is strength. Sophia Dahlin's language and sweetly metered pacing perfectly anticipate my feelings, surprising me with how much earnestness I have preserved.” –Nora Treatbaby
“I find Sophia Dahlin's poetry to be gentle yet subtly jarring. Her poems split images away from context, letting them add up to something fresh, snappy, delightful.” –Judy Grahn
Praise for Natch
Sophia Dahlin's first full-length collection, Natch, is a dazzling array of queer erotic lyrics demanding pasture in the romantic sublime. By turns dreamy, hysterical, earthy, and perverse, the poems of Natch speak the dialogue of a person’s parts, the dynamism of a queer body desiring something between rest and consumption. In her stunningly assured voice, compounded of bravado and vulnerability, Dahlin outlines the threshold where feeling takes over the body’s functioning, desire leads us past deciding, and we are so lustful that we are not dead when we have finished dying.
"Sophia Dahlin’s witty, searching, and multi-humored poems are astute and forthright in their light/dark erotics. With the buoyancy that Natch suggests, this is also serious stuff. Refusing default logics, ingenious poetic powers are at play in these pages."—Joan Retallack
"The thinking in Sophia Dahlin's poems is thrillingly unforeseeable, the turns of phrase are addictively unique, and the poems as wholes will leave most of the other things you read tasting awfully bland by comparison. This is poetry written at the pitch of a brilliant mind, expressed with rare lucidity."—Kit Schluter
"Natch is poetry gold-plated with queer love and lust. Sophia Dahlin resists the rigid binary of top v. bottom and instead renders a switchy lyricism that perverts all things pastoral in embrace of queer slipperiness. Give Natch the summer sweat and oozing attention it deserves."—Andrea Abi-Karam
Brandon Brown, Interview, for BOMB
Peter Myers for Tupelo Quarterly
Casey Stepaniuk for Autostraddle
Oakland Public Library “Best of the Year”
Gregg Shapiro for Bay Area Reporter