The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove

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.

Centering 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.

Praise for The Tinder Sonnets

“Swipe right on raw honesty. LoveGrove reimagines the sonnet for the digital age, crafting a collection that’s bold, brilliant, and bravely dissects what it means to connect—and resist—in today’s complicated world. A daring collection that reclaims desire, dismantling digital-age and inherited misogyny with candid, defiant verse.” —Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

“The Tinder Sonnets is a stirring and charismatic take on contemporary dating, though it prods a much deeper vein: nature, nurture, or pervert? In LoveGrove’s bejeweled, salty language, these poems remix social codes and poke at old dreams to thrive.” —Tamara Faith Berger, author of Yara

“ A strong swimmer in these uneven flesh-drenched waters, mindfields of online desire, LoveGrove delivers the goods on every page, always noting the nearest exits, nodding to Angela at the bar, practicing the code, ‘Centuries of women warning women’… The power in these sonnets is a hard-won blazing collection that insists on nothing less than the brilliant truth, the flame that changes you. Not since Lynn Crosbie’s Liar has there been a more telling, essential read on the sexes. She bows.” —Kirby, author of Fairy and She

Press Coverage

“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