Natch: City Lights Spotlight No. 20

(Paperback)

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• 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.

Reviews

"Dahlins 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 doesnt founder in nostalgia. Dahlins 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 loveparticularly queer and non-exclusive loveis 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 Dahlins 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 its 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 Dahlins 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 Dahlins 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. Its the sensation of drinking from the fountain of youth with a loop-de-loop strawrefreshing, 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 Dahlins aesthetic weds the we-want-it-all politics of Bay Area poets Diane di Prima and June Jordan with the medieval sexuality of Robert Glck, 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

Author Bio

Sophia Dahlin is a poet in Berkeley. She leads generative poetry workshops and teaches youth creative writing. With Jacob Kahn, she edits a small chapbook press called Eyelet. Her first book, Natch, was released in 2020 by City Lights Books.