Sophia Dahlin. Glove Money. New York: Nightboat Books, 2025. 92 pages.
 




“I hurt my back yet lift you to pin / you against the kitchen wall / I risk it,” Sophia Dahlin writes in her second book of poems, Glove Money. Throughout the collection, she pairs the sharpness of pain with the pleasure of devotion, a tension central to dyke/lesbian culture and its poetic lineage. Dahlin traverses sapphic lust-spaces and invisible geographies of yearning, positioning the reader within the force-of-the-yearn. Some of these invisible geographies trace the floral planes and seas Sappho might have seen, oceansides, triangles, the space between lovers on the phone; others are more grounded—New York, Oakland, the streets of Berkeley, “school,” the Midwest, the airport. Dahlin evokes all the essential ingredients of Sappho—violets, dew, dawn, desire, seafoam, nectar, and, most crucially, the lesbian potential for gender expansion. In “Bi Eraser,” the line “There are two kinds of lesbian: Sappho, / and a roomful of lesbians” reads as a trans allegory, illuminating that the sapphic lust-space includes transness. In Glove Money, meaning expands cumulatively, like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering resonance over repetition. In “Sapphic Lecture,” Dahlin writes:
     

if you fear you are not gay enough

go out and do something about it

like suck a dyke’s dick
or get fisted

dump your boyfriend
fear can be destructive and it will age you
it will age you like the sun
but you can enjoy your fear if you are careless with it (52)

The canonical poetic occasions throughout the collection balance the intermingling of fantasy with the autobiographical. Both fantasy as dream and fantasy as fantastical elements (timetravel, a talking space-heater). There is a form of dyke-speak that sounds like conversations I’ve had with friends or lovers put into poetry form. Although conversational in tone, the voice holds an otherworldlyness, a voice coming from a figure beyond, hidden by mist. Once, I read a Lauren Berlant book calledDesire/Love, where she wrote about fantasy’s role in a chaotic incoherent world. Fantasy was described as having the ability to create a sense of stability, a throughline of coherence to hold onto in one’s psyche. I think Berlant’s description of fantasy frames the politics of Glove Money, that living fantasy, materially realized or in one’s mind, is a form of psychological continuity, outside of work and war, to invest one’s self and heart into. Fantasy in the sapphic lust-space holds essential importance for how the poems manifest. There will never be enough exploration and documentation of it. Another politic. Through lyrical playfulness and sincerity, one third of the book in, we learn what the sapphic poet's desire plays out into—an imagined future. In “Chosen Family,” Dahlin references the Alison Bechdel quote “[b]ut I want more out of life than an extended family of ex-lovers,” which she expands into:

I want more than the families extending from the families of my 

        ex-lovers and their ex-lovers and the families of their ex-lovers and 

        all the desire it takes to create families of ex lovers or new persons 

        extending

more than all their wants I want

just one extensive love  (19)

“One extensive love” rings out as an incantation of a fantasy, a fantasy that is the touchstone of one of the book’s constant desires. Repetition in “Chosen Family” releases into disorientation, then clarification, whereas throughout the rest of the collection, repetition has an incantatory effect, “...oh my heart’s a bruise/ my clit is a bruise” or “part part part petal,” as Dahlin writes. Repetition creates a foothold, a notion to steady oneself in the text, then repetition is an act of integration.

I can’t help but think of what repetition means to a sapphic poet, how the incantatory effect is teeming inside this book. Repetition is a meaningful act of re-remembering, an act of instilling fantasy, and a visible impulse to create validity of one’s being in an unstable reality. Repetition insists we remember something. The repetition of the word or name “Violet” and “rose” gathers meaning as it is repeated throughout, shifting, rolling into an image that is expanded upon poem by poem. Such images gain power and connotation in the world built within Glove Money, as in “Sapphic 13”: 

friend

to speak to you directly

no I don’t feel a soul in any rose

not  in my body either                                                

nor do I believe

a heaven awaits

instead the delicate layers of me

drink time                               

not like a rose

do not in dew at 5am                          

all lipped by crystals sink red petals into morning                                           

a rose is a rose body (49)

The force-of-the-yearn is the fuel that motivates the sapphic poet’s decision making, it can be a state of delirium that the poet is always half in, like the way dolphins’ brains sleep only half way at a time. The language choice satisfies this state of being, progressing through narrative but also in lyrical fragmentation. Logic is altered. The cause and effect shows the principles of operation in the Sapphic-lust-space: if you have gloves you never have to touch money again, if your lover calls to you you throw your furniture to the floor. To situate in the sapphic-lust-space is to search for the hidden motivator. Is the hidden want, mutual devotion? To raise love’s importance? Is the fantasy all-encompassing love outside of life’s demands? Is it the presence of a world built between lovers the more real, more desired thing above all else? Glove Money depicts the present-day sapphic obligations beside the ancient, bringing the past and the present together to ride in tandem. Time is altogether interpreted and felt differently in relation to the force-of-the-yearn, as readers gather this based on the distance of lovers or fantasy to the speaker within each poem. How do we behave in the tension that is the force-of-the-yearn? Perhaps we are meant to continue the experiment.