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.

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.

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

MER Bookshelf – January 2026 —MER Journal

Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2026 Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

Read an Excerpt from The Tinder Sonnets —Send My Love to Anyone

“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 

TNQ National Poetry Month Reading List —Selena Mercuri, The New Quarterly

“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

A Selection from My Bookshelf: A Recommended Reading List by Jennifer LoveGrove —49th Shelf

15 Canadian Poetry Collections to Add to Your TBR this Poetry Month —BookTrib

A Coffee Date with Jennifer LoveGrove, author of The Tinder Sonnets —Coffee Date with Authors

Poets Resist: Jennifer LoveGrove + The Tinder Sonnets —All Lit Up

“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

Jennifer LoveGrove: Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #59 —The Miramichi Reader 

“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

“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

Three Now; Three Then: The Valuable Impact of Canadian Poetry Books in the 21st Century —Catherine Owen, Wolsak & Wynn blog

“One of the things I love about writing by people whose positionality is different from mine is that I get to see what the world looks like from their perspective. The Tinder Sonnets gives me a glimpse into what women see when they look at men. It’s not a pretty picture, but the poems’ playfulness and humour keep me from looking away. I loved this book.” —Ken Wilson, The Miramichi Reader

Learning to trust intuition in fiction writing – Jennifer LoveGrove —On Creative Writing

“The Tinder Sonnets is raw, it is also autobiographical. The collection does not just give voice to the pain, but LoveGrove steers desire and play in relationships. There is humour also.” —Sara Hailstone