We know that Sophia Dahlin’s latest book, Glove Money, invents a kind of pastoral, because it begins with a scene of capitalist exchange. Opening with the lines:

Glove Money’s titular first poem, “Glove Money,” introduces a logic of transaction that turns on the contradiction between its need to engage in a social world and its own basically antisocial drives. The need to avoid touching money motivates the need for gloves, which in turn motivates the need for money—the chain-like movement of repetition in Dahlin’s poem draws out the convoluted, somehow both self-undermining and self-motivating logic of so-called demand. As the need to avoid touching money demands money, the logic of this exchange turns outward towards an explicit revulsion against others in the social world of monetary transaction: “others’ hands, / disgusting.” “Glove money” turns out to be, in good Marxian fashion, the medium of exchange that not only connects objects to each other by virtue of their abstract value, but that invents a social order which one enters already estranged. As Karl Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844:

Against money’s mediating force—how it mediates our relation to other people—Dahlin posits at the heart of the poem an ambivalent logic of touch, in the volta between the second and third stanzas of the poem. Moving from the logic of “glove money,” the poem abruptly shifts to: “Once before I knew I was a kind of / lesbian, when I just liked boys, when I was but / a board, I mean when I despised my own thin / smallboned chest, I saw on her…” a necklace with a hand-shaped pendant that fell in the span of flesh between the clavicle and the swell of her breasts. “How erotic, / how could it be so erotic, how secret / that her necklace touches her, she wears the touch / in public,” the poem ends. Here, Dahlin’s speaker posits another object imbued with the eroticism of touch—but unlike the glove money, lifted by the redemptive force of lesbian desire. With the final turn, however, in the public wearing of a private touch, redemption isn’t fully attained, but rather casts explanatory force backward into the logic of the glove money. “I would like enough money for gloves, / enough gloves for money, and two hid hands / held by my secret skin”: we find that the gloves are also hand talismans, and that one wears their “secret” touch publicly. But unlike the pendant, the gloves betray their imbrication with money—the eros of the glove is polluted by the gloves’ romance with money. So the poem ends by establishing a set of contrasts that form many of the continuing concerns of the book: the public and the private, the world of the market and the world of the flesh, and the social world in its better and worse manifestations. In a sense, Glove Money considers all of these contrasts in light of their erotic potential.

Now, why is all of this pastoral?

In her book, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience, Anne-Lise François offers at least two definitions of the pastoral: first, as a genre “justifiably maligned” as one in which “you point to poor people and say how good they have it.” Second, François points toward the Romantic pastoral’s more ambiguous and enduring legacy in the “hypercathexis of figures of the ordinary, common and indistinct, making even the lightest of ‘letdowns’ readable as a redemptive dream of ‘coming down to earth,’ and charging all deflationary or ‘leveling’ (with regard to the political pitch and tenor of the French Revolution) rhythms with democratizing, universalizing ends.” That is, the Romantic pastoral may be characterized by its political investment in figures of ordinary life and common people (think, for example, of Wordsworth’s leech gatherer), and insofar as it lacks the grandeur of more fervent revolutionary visions, the very anticlimax of the Romantic pastoral figure crystallizes a dream of a democratized, universalized everyday life. Glove Money playfully flirts with the former definition, and flips the latter, such that the book’s interest in figures of the ordinary carry a redemptive dream of “coming down to earth” that comes hand in hand with a revolutionary ethos. See, for example, the poems “Gratitude is Counterrevolutionary” (“eat the hand that feeds you / then—what would [Diane di Prima] say—plant your own kibble”), “Revolutionary Fragment” (“There’s not going to be / standardized gay vocabulary / unless we all lose”), “Sapphic Lecture” (“if you fear not being queer enough / try to think of yourself as lyrical dirt / anticapitalist animals might furrow”), and others. In Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, L. Marx also picks out two kinds of pastoralism—“one that is popular and sentimental, the other imaginative and complex.” This latter kind offers “the contrast between two worlds, one identified with rural peace and simplicity, the other with urban power and sophistication, which has been used by writers working in the pastoral mode since the time of Virgil.” In the basic structure of this “complex” pastoral design, according to L. Marx, the “ideal” of “peace and harmony in a green pasture” plays one part, while the “counterforce” of the “real” conditions of economic forces and relations of production plays the other—this is the machine in the garden. L. Marx’s and François’s versions of the pastoral turn on very different axes; Glove Money manages to invoke and complicate both, setting many established notions of the subgenre in motion and turning most of them on their head.

If “Glove Money” raises the question of L. Marx’s complex pastoral through an anti-capitalist approach, “Life Stuff” completes the green half of the thought. Dahlin’s pastoral is self-consciously ideal: “obviously I am a child of language, for I think I am a child of nature / raised on words I believe I was raised in a green pasture,” state the opening lines of the poem. But rather than positing a machine in the garden, in this poem, there’s more like a garden in the machine:

Insofar as “Life Stuff” inverts the vision of a pastoral that posits the “real” as an intrusion upon the “ideal,” the pastoral here posits the ideal of a simple, rural life in green nature against, first, the real ecological conditions of the planet today, then within a montage of a post-industrial capitalist landscape. The final line of the poem follows immediately after the prior excerpt: “I am for strangers, nature, myself and strangers.” Here again, as in the rest of Glove Money, there’s satisfyingly no simple redemptive gesture. But one could read the commas as either the conventional demarcation for separate items in a list, posing “strangers,” “myself and strangers,” and “nature” as discrete ideas, or as grammatically marking out asides that works as a gloss, so that “nature” is what one means by “strangers” and “myself and strangers.” With the latter (further evidenced in an earlier lines, “surely I’m a city poet for I think it’s done in dusty hay bales / [...] yet have caught heat loping in the easy business of bigger cities/ in the building shadow, in the crooks of simple strangers / feel myself most in heat here in this distance that we cultivate together”), the pastoral ideal is either deferred or transferred to the sociable spaces between bodies together in a city.

The following poem, “Hey Hivebody,” picks up and furthers the promise of the collective body, beginning with the bold claim:

The first three poems of the volume (“Glove Money,” “Life Stuff,” and “Hey Hivebody,”) establish much of the recurring items in the book’s conceptual inventory; ideas that are turned over and reset, in different registers and modes, throughout the following poems. Dahlin has a genius for voice—the poems of Glove Money are fundamentally lyric, and of a variety that looks outward from the so-called “charmed circle of lyric” (Sharon Cameron). Imbued with a characterological complexity torqued out of features characteristic of the lyric mode that today more often turn to a kind of introversion of formal self-indexicality (paradox, syllogism, double-entendres that hinge on either semantic or syntactical ambiguity), Dahlin’s speakers are “overheard” in the way a stage whisper is “overheard,” or in the way of that certain brand of flirtation where one says something to a person beside the love object, hoping the beloved will know you’re speaking to or about them. See, for example, “Invocation”: “o Aphrodite / make her love me / even though she is focusing.”

I’ve focused on only the first few poems. But I don’t mean to suggest that these poems are all there is to the book—just the opposite. Rather, because these poems are so dense (Glove Money is not, in my experience, a quick read, or a book one reads once) and charming, I mean to suggest that a reader may be best rewarded by devoting similar attention to each poem. Dahlin’s poems are worth that much attention and more.