The Tinder Sonnets

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From acclaimed writer Jennifer LoveGrove comes an electric poetry collection exploring female sexual desire, contemporary dating, misogyny, and middle age that reflects and embodies our social media-saturated times.

Unabashedly confessional and radically vulnerable, The Tinder Sonnets rallies against the long-standing demand that “women of a certain age” politely accept being rendered non-sexual. Each poem is based on a date, relationship, or contemporary dating insight, and highlights how misogyny impacts the way we connect in the modern world–or don’t.

Juxtaposing folklore and the natural world against the digital sphere of texting and dating apps, this is poetry that defies invisibility and instead confronts and subverts it through a discerning feminist lens. While experimenting with the traditional form of the sonnet, these sonically textured poems are playful and wry, erotic and joyful, all while refusing to shy away from palpable anger, frustration, and disappointment.

Centring strength and resilience in the face of a resurgence of misogynistic chauvinism, The Tinder Sonnets is a staunch refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, or to be quiet and polite.

AUTHOR

Jennifer LoveGrove

Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of the poetry collections The Dagger Between Her Teeth and I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel. Her writing has been published widely, and she studied creative writing at York University. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Haliburton. Watch How We Walk is her first novel.

Reviews

“As a reader, I feel not only entrusted with the speaker’s tender truth-wounds, but empowered by new language to wield so that I, too, can be unmistakable in my fury and freedom. I’m grateful for this collection.” —Molly Cross-Blanchard, Quill & Quire, starrred review

“This is sex, love, desire, body writing that feels incredibly contemporary, that offers relatable and knowable perspectives and depictions of situations and systems that exist in the current world, and it does all of this in fourteen-line iambic pentameter… sharp, powerful, emotive, witty poetry full of humour, warmth, excitement and nuance… I loved The Tinder Sonnets.” —Triumph of the Now

“LoveGrove’s sonnets take the sonnet form very, very seriously, as they are 10 syllable, 14 line sonnets that stretch across 120 pages. If Diane Seuss’s sonnet form is a ‘barbed wire dress’, as one critic described it, LoveGrove’s sonnet form is an online dating profile; or maybe a ‘needlepoint’ stitched with pricked bleeding fingers, or a redacted love affair, or an autopsy of modern dating culture, or even a cautionary tale.” —Chris Banks, The Woodlot Review

“LoveGrove’s The Tinder Sonnets get right to the gross tedium of it all in poems that excite and disturb, rile and delight.” —Brilliant Women Inc

“The Tinder Sonnets works against the cultural invisibility of middle-aged women by insisting on the speaker’s desire, point of view and presences.” melanie brannagan frederiksen, Winnipeg Free press