Natch by Sophia Dahlin (City Lights Books, paperback)
Publication Date: September 1, 2020
Publisher Marketing: my darling // whole lion // one wonders why am I / mugged or mugger // again my wallet sucks / my holes have holes halve // to avoid / to void to hole up // for a while w/baby / for the winter--"Prismr of Love"
In her first full-length collection, Sophia Dahlin fashions a dazzling array of queer pastoral lyrics as a means to interrogate received notions of the romantic sublime. By turns funny, passionate, and erotic, the poems of Natch express an intensity of longing and desire, a poetics of queer bodies narrated with a stunningly assured voice, compounded of bravado and vulnerability. Natch, as Dahlin herself writes, "is about feeling taking over the body's functioning, desiring leading you past deciding. This book is about trusting and mistrusting certain parts of the body, so the body is parts, each part with its own dynamism. It's about being so lustful that you are not dead when you have finished dying.
