Sophia Dahlin, Glove Money

 

 

THAT’S MY WEAKNESS NOW

I’m well known throughout the co-ops for being a splashy dishwasher,
and I’m well known in the suburbs for singing to the mayor’s daughter. 

Wine is cheaper than books unless you drink it by the bowlful.
I need books hand over hand and my hands are soulful. 

Softer than a cloud in a child’s rhyme, your dainty cleaning after love.
Softer than the edges of a fan’s blades furred with dust. 

You speak intimate universes to your listeners, then make moue.
Surely no one since Boop has winced at fierier triumphs than Sophia.

The latest from Berkeley poet and editor Sophia Dahlin is Glove Money (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Natch (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2020). “obviously I am a child of language,” she writes, to open the poem “LIFE STUFF,” “for I think I am a child of nature / raised on words I believe I was raised in a green pasture / having ideas about goats, ideas about sheep / yet literally never in my life having been beside a sheep of any color / temperament or texture, sure though of its woolly heft and fecal odor [.]” 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. “I come sore my immediate waters,” she writes, as part of the short poem “RIVERR PONDR LAKER SEAR,” “run drawing out these previous waters / I wish rivers of cum didn’t all connect / but glad you can’t step in it twice / the water’s always changing [.]” These poems are insistent, immediately present and confident, witty and even dangerous, such as the poem “SHE’S GOT A HABIT,” that includes: “I’m the schmuck receiving warning, // and I’m the predatory lesbian / promising oral understand to / the girls at karaoke. / But I’m unbelievable, / I croon to him / ‘You’ll be the lonely one’ and I mean // me, the dizzy cook, who bites / the tops off / carrots, swaps recipes mid- / bake, spins in the pan / to check the oil’s hot.” And I can’t imagine there are too many poems that weave together karaoke, cooking, oral sex, a reference to John Lennon and a phrase by Canadian poet Lisa Robertson (and that’s only on the first page of this particular five page ride). Pay attention to Sophia Dahlin: this collection really is something glorious to behold.