Queer pastoral lyrics take on the romantic sublime in a stunningly assured debut collection.

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, author of BOSCH'D

"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, author of Pierrot's Fingernails

"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, author of EXTRATRANSMISSION

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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

Book Information
ISBN 9780872868106
Author Sophia Dahlin
Format Paperback
Page Count 100
Imprint City Lights Books
Publisher City Lights Books