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Queer pastoral lyrics take on the romantic sublime in a stunningly assured debut collection.
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.
Summary
Queer pastoral lyrics take on the romantic sublime in a stunningly assured debut collection.
Foreword
- Co-op available.
- Galleys available upon request
- National print/online campaign: New Yorker, BOMB, NYT, LA Times, PW, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, Paris Review, Lambda Literary Review, Lit Hub, Advocate, Brooklyn Rail, Bustle, Teen Vogue, Poetry Magazine, Jacket 2, O, LARB, Wolfman's New Life Quarterly, Full Stop, Granta, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Entropy, and more.
- Social media campaign: City Lights Twitter (131K Followers), City Lights Facebook (50K Follows), City Lights Instagram (30K Followers)
- Regional Bay Area tour, plus touring in LA, Portland, Seattle, Iowa City, Milwaukee, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, and Austin.
- Excerpts in Lit Hub, BOMB, Lambada Literary Review, and others.
Additional text
"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
