The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove (Book*hug Press, 2026)


 You must first see this strikingly disruptive cover collage created by Kate Sutherland. O my, ouch. The list of "Key Selling Features" that came with my review copy of The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove suggests that this book is "ideal for readers of poetry, middle-aged women [and] feminists." Check, check and check. One wishes however that readers of non fiction, young men and those confused about what feminism means would also read this blast of a book. 

The description of the collection in the press materials doesn't even mention LoveGrove's experimentation with the sonnet form, so I'll start there. These are unrhymed sonnets, all 14 lines, in titled triptychs that alternately offer up temporally elaborative content (as in "Orgasm is not the goal he said and I rolled my eyes" that narrates a series of dates with E - who fluctuates between online and offline, being possessive and detached, "minutes" becoming "mirrors" then "manifestos" as the strange connection dissolves in a fusion landscape where "Whales with bellies full of plastic wash up/on my doorstep") and Oulipo-style constraint games that involve variant questions, as in "That time you made me a flow chart of our relationship" where the query, "Did your father betray your mother?" becomes "Did your fault betray your motif?" that focus more on the contextual lingual interplay than on a direct tale of fuckery in Tinderland. 

Traditional sonnets, Shakespearean or Petrarchan, have a volta or turn in either the final couplet or somewhere in the last six lines. Do these? They might be either all volta or none, depending on how you read them. If you think of a volta as a kind of shock then they are constant. One is always turning in a what the fack way from initialized male gazes, requests to slap or choke, grotesqueries of rapists becoming cops so "it's okay," and other forms of patriarchal bullshit, to images of the messed-with natural world (the decimation of the passenger pigeon to the "glaciers" that should have been "patented...before they all melted") and allusions to everything from The Book of Job to etymologies of brocade to nouns in Lidia Yuknavitch's Thrust. 

It's mind and gut and heart blowing to be frank. Like Sharon Olds meets Lisa Robertson then smashes up (respectfully) Charlotte Smith's 1783 Elegiac Sonnets in a peri-menopausal prowl through the sad wilds of online dating. Some fantastically-frightening lines of dark prescience: "We still think that we'll/never run out of anything: air, meat,/ sex, those small plastic people to flaunt on/the tops of cakes" ; "Though I am invisible now, I still/ have to be young and thin and beautiful./ I tear off tiny pieces of myself/every day."; "Used to be enough to try/ not to get pregnant. Try not to get caught./Try not to get raped. Try not to get killed./I'm tired of trying, of choking things back" ; "Do not let it touch skin. Do not inhale....Do not exhale. Do not ask questions. Take/a breath. Take a joke. Take it. Take it bitch." 

Now that's a pow of pain. You will feel every part of your suffering in a misogynistic soceity through these sonnets and yet you will still relish pleasure in the echoes of the momentary partner who is "happy" when you "come" or better ye, the self knowledge expressed in the unchanging disinterest in having kids ("I didn't wax or wane"). 

I remember my few forays into this kind of hook-up world and how icky and confused it often made me feel (who would pay for what, how was I being perceived online vs in reality, why did I feel guilty when I didn't want to cuddle after bad sex etc) and LoveGrove's The Tinder Sonnets get right to the gross tedium of it all in poems that excite and disturb, rile and delight. In the final triptych called, "T - helps me stack the firewood" the speaker says: "I grew roots deep in/solitude, dirtsure and mostly warm," then, with that foundation, perhaps allows a deeper slip into affection, remarking, "We fall ashen, singed/but intact," such assertions underscoring the transcendent nature of being able to make art out of what has attempted to elide or even erase us. Yes!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All of Us Hidden by Joanna Streetly (Caitlin Press 2025)

Image
It might come as little surprise that I adore lyric poetry, real lyrics grounded in actual experience that produce their own wild and accurate sonorities. I can usually sense a faker, a Mary Oliver-type poem that strains within its own imagery, desperate to produce a responsive "ooooo ahhhhh" in the reader, rather than one that flows organically with a depth of awareness of line breaks and assonantal bridges and an emotion that emerges from its origins, not one generated superficially via the placement of "feeling words" on the page.  All of Us Hidden is that kind of book, a deep winding through familial loss and environmental torment, indigenous awarenesses and parental yearnings. The poems surge in five parts, of which only the final one "Too Fast" felt like it could have been re-shaped and the remaining pieces inserted into the prior four sections. Streetly uses the simplest of diction (salmon, rock, spruce tree) but interweaves these pure signifiers w...
Read more

The Pollination Field by Kim Fahner (Turnstone Press, 2025)

Image
Books that are utterly entranced by a core subject, set of images or even a haunting word compel me. I consider Tim Bowling's oeuvre of salmon and the river, and also his Tenderman texts, and then too, his tiny homage to his great-aunt Gladys and her early 20th century bee-keeping, The Annotated Bee and Me (2010).  As for bee-keeping in Canada in contemporary times, I recently read Jenna Butler's Revery: A Year of Bees (2020), a factual (but still magical) account of the practice that prepared me for some of the knowledge required to fully appreciate The Pollination Field.  I must say that this book almost felt like it needed to be two texts: one bee-obsessed and the other a sequence of the additional lyrics for her dead parents found in the Cortege section (o how I love the image of her carrying her "father's metal knees" aloft as if "crystal balls"), as well as other pieces such as "An Elegy for Australia, Burning" or "A Note on the Ex...
Read more

The Time of the Great Singing by Elizabeth Philips (Freehand Books 2026)

Image
  Jan Zwicky , on the back of Elizabeth Philips ' exquisitely lyrical collection, states that this is a book "that does not distinguish between elegy and celebration ." Now, although I rarely appreciate the flawed art of blurbing, not only is this a beautiful sentence, but it is entirely accurate in its assessment of the subject matter and intent of Philips' poems. Whether the lyrics delve into the loss of parents or the loss of trees, the focal points interweave with each other, so that a mother's dementia is gentled by the soothing sight of a "freshet of green light" ( The Last June ) or a recognition of the "difficult last years" of her father are lifted by another memory, that of discovering a well together (right away, Heaney is echoed) and their faces being reflected in the watery "aspen-inflected sky" ( Just ). There is a magic here of consolations that rarely slip into easy-solution triteness.  Much of this transcendent effe...
Read more