Natch: City Lights Spotlight No. 20

Description

Sophia Dahlin has a good following already in the Bay Area, and intends to tour also in LA, Portland, Seattle, Iowa City, Chicago, Milwaukee, Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, and Austin.

Sophia Dahlin earned her BA from Bard College and her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has appeared in many journals, including BOMB, Fence, Lambda Literary, Denver Quarterly, and The Recluse. With Jacob Kahn, she edits the chapbook press Eyelet. She lives in Oakland, California, where she teaches with California Poets in the Schools, conducts generative writing workshops, and hosts readings.

"Dahlin's first full-length collection shows a vast array of queer pastoral lyric poems. They are by turns funny, erotic, longing, passionate, brave, and vulnerable."-Autostraddle "The world of Natch is, in part, an old world. A world where horny herdspeople take a break and steal time from their lords by exchanging dirty verses with each other. But [Sophia Dahlin's] work doesn't founder in nostalgia. Dahlin's poems are for our time, for our yucky and seductive mouths and lips, and we should all be stealing hours from our lords to revel in it. Somewhere between ancient pastoral tradition and the very present-tense erotic vocabulary of her life as a lover, Dahlin brings enormous musical sensuality, romantic intelligence, and impressive wit in these marvelous poems."-Brandon Brown, BOMB Magazine Natch ventures that to hurl oneself towards such risk is part of a commitment to a life built and shared with others, a politics originating at the most intimate scale. This terrain of love-particularly queer and non-exclusive love-is what Dahlin, in Natch, holds her eye and ear to. She revels in its joys and anguishes, its glints of a world arranged differently, in poems that veer with sudden tenderness and bustle with delight. ... Natch would have it no other way: the satisfaction of getting is amplified by the ecstasy of giving up, and the self's dis- and reintegration into a greater, more unknowable flow becomes a scale model for a revolutionary rearrangement of social and political life. What will this new world look like, where we are all each other's backs? Dahlin's poems give us not the answer, but how that answer feels."-Peter Myers, Tupelo Quarterly "Sophia Dahlin delivers beautiful, tactile motion in Natch. ... There's a controlled delirium here, and it's deliciously sexy."-The Rumpus "[An] outstanding full-length debut collection. Dahlin's distinctive voice is at turns erotic, observant, experimental, and never humdrum."-Bay Area Reporter "In Dahlin's poetry, bodies, the objects that bodies touch, and the surrounding atmosphere melt into one another until it seems obvious that body/object/world are one discrete thing having a temporary experience of separateness. The landscape of Dahlin's debut collection, Natch, is an idiosyncratic and languid ooze of domestic language. Words appear as verbs after the eye has already tried to parse them as nouns. The syntax one might expect from an ode or an aubade collapses and morphs into something similar but distinctly strange. It's the sensation of drinking from the fountain of youth with a loop-de-loop straw-refreshing, playful, rejuvenating, and bouncy."-Annulet: A Journal of Poetics "Natch asks the question of how space unfolds in the distance between beloveds. These love poems introduce Catullun drama to Sapphic distance, coy and calculated in their flirtation. ... As Dahlin's aesthetic weds the we-want-it-all politics of Bay Area poets Diane di Prima and June Jordan with the medieval sexuality of Robert Gluck, she builds a new world where money dissolves into its own overwrought impulses, desire cannot be tempered, and sex reigns supreme. Natch thrives on messiness, reminding us that desire must be leaned into, and to temper this impulse, to 'soften the want / is not neat.'"-The Critical Flame