SECOND ACTS: A SECOND LOOK AT SECOND BOOKS OF POEMS
by LISA RUSS SPAAR
A Review of Glove Money by Sophia Dahlin (Nightboat Books, 2025) and Fifty Mothers: Poems by Preeti Vangani (River River Books, 2026).
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson, from “O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love”
Maggie Milner’s essay, “Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?” in a recent issue of The Yale Review explores her vexed relationship with accessible poems of transcendence and joy, which “charm the masses and repel the cognoscenti in equal measure.” Milner’s meditation got me thinking about the reasons for my own sometimes cringey reaction to popular, positive poets. What is it, for example, that irritates me when the first thing family and non-poet friends recommend when they learn that I write poems is “to check out the poems of Rupi Kaur? Or Billy Collins?” Why do I roll my eyes as I pass down the hallway to my therapy appointment, a poem by Rumi or Ross Gay taped to all the counselors’ doors, including one on the door of my own therapist, an illustrated broadside of Oliver’s “The Summer Day” with its to me tauntingly annoying final question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Am I irked by what I perceive as these poets’ “I’ve got all the good questions, if not quite all the answers” smugness? Do I find their earnest admonishments didactic if not simplistic? Could it be that I am jealous of poets like Oliver and Kaur’s ubiquitous, “wild and precious” readership? Jealous, perhaps most, of their apparent capacity for what can sometimes come across as unalloyed optimism?
Like Milner, I’ve grown to realize that my initial disavowal of poems of directly stated, unadorned gratitude has primarily to do with my own snobbery or discontent when I encounter them, and with careful reading I’m almost always won over by subtleties I’ve missed in first readings. “The prospect of offering a corrective reading of Oliver’s work suddenly excited me,” Millner writes of her own rediscovery of Oliver’s poems. “I imagined her poems blossoming under new scrutiny into complex literary objects, layered with branching ambiguities or sublimated queer desire. (As a child, I hadn’t known that either of us—Oliver or I myself—was gay.) In much the way that reading Oliver’s poems had trained me to notice details in the world around me, my experience as a poet would, I hoped, allow me to find nuance I had previously missed in her poems.”
I briefly rehearse the evolution of my appreciation for poems of, well, frank appreciation, to say how excited I am to find in new second books of poems by two Bay Area writers—Sophia Dahlin’s Glove Money (Nightboat, 2025) and Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026)—treatments of exuberant, even extravagant joy complicated in equal parts by often extravagant suffering—the suffering of love, distance, ardor, and grief. Ecstatic extremes of emotion (unrequited love, erotic love, lost love) can rob us of our senses of self (ecstasy < ex – stasis, beside the self). How to replace the “world” that a self can seem if it feels obliterated by extremity of feeling—of want, of grief? Language, these two books suggest, can be a means: the othering and reclamation that words can provide.
Lovechild of a polyamorous poetic parentage—Sappho, Diane di Prima, Robert Frost, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, and Anne Carson, among others—Sophia Dahlin writes poems of unabashed sexuality and a voracious, often audacious engagement with the physical world, from space heaters to dahlias. She is a love poet, a poet of love, and her poems offer the full menu of amour, in all its delight and its complication. Preeti Vangani’s book is also a book of love poems, albeit of a different sort. The work vibrates with a legacy of “mothers”—mother bodies, mother proxies, lover mothers, father mothers, self-mothers. On the one hand a keening book-length elegy for a mother who died too young and on the other a transgressive bildungsroman of sexual becoming, Fifty Mothers explores the twin ecstasies of death and sex in excitingly reframed ways. Both poets traffic in excess—not just one mother, for example, but fifty of them in Vangani’s book (“I have fifty mothers in total. Four are my mother’s real sisters, forty-five are cousins. I call them all maa-si, meaning like-mother. But when your original mother dies, likeness dies and you end up with fifty mothers”). “More than all their wants,” writes Dahlin in “Chosen Family,” “I want / just one extensive love.”
Sophia Dahlin lives in Berkeley, California, where she conducts generative workshops out of her apartment as well as online and in area parks and schools. She is also the co-editor, with Jacob Kahn, of Eyelet Press, which publishes poetry chapbooks and hosts readings in Oakland. Dahlin’s first book, Natch, appeared from City Lights Books in 2020, and although published during the pandemic nonetheless had an enthusiastic reception and a wide reach. Praised for its queering of the pastoral and its intrepid forays into the economies of erotic desire, the title Natch evokes both the natural world and that slang quip abbreviation of “natural,” natch, delivered with a wink and an air of irresistible sexual confidence.
In an appreciation of Natch in The Critical Flame, Ayaz Muratoglu writes of two poems in the book, “Way Up Late” and “Broke Up”: “Here, we see the primary themes of the collection—money, weight, lust, refractions of self, space—play out against one another as we learn ‘the bed’s not / where the love weighs’ and witness an exchange between a bank and the recurring lizard. These poems suggest that as bodies (human and lizard) move and melt in love, they not only morph into one another, but create a polyamorous, anti-capitalist ideal: a day spent lounging on warm rocks, eyes swelling from the heat, as ‘all my lucre goes / teeter-totter on a scale.’ Dahlin’s politics envision a liberatory world, countering the loneliness of capitalism with collectivism and pleasure.”
In her second collection, Glove Money, Dahlin continues to explore her maximalist conviction that real wealth lies in open, shared pursuit of happiness, freedom, and delight. As it turns out, the phrase “glove money” actually does refer to something in particular: lagniappe tips or bonuses given to servants, ostensibly to purchase otherwise unaffordable luxuries like gloves. And this is a fitting association for Dahlin’s collection, which values acts of gratitude and connection above transactional commerce. But in an interview, she explains that the phrase arose when she saw that a recent Lammie winner wore to the awards ceremony a pair of gloves she had been able to purchase because of her winnings, literally a kind of glove money. A friend encouraged her to use the phrase as her next book’s title. It’s also hard not to hear an echo of the idiomatic phrase “not for love nor money” in the book’s moniker, a nod to the “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” economies of Dahlin’s poetics, a sense that real love, like gender, is unpurchasable and beyond commodification.
Dahlin takes extravagant pleasure in the plurality of the shared experiences of friends and lovers (“to be with your friends in conversation / is to crowd into a body again / a full mind and participate in it / in what you are missing for instance / desire always very present in a group / ordering drinks on Saturday after the reading / everyone’s knees everyone’s jacket / reach over you for that” from “Hey Hivebody”). There is an undeniable sense of Whitmanian plenitude here, of pantheistic multitude. Likewise, the poems throughout the book boldly sample a host of beloved influences, making almost every poem a kind of party. In any one poem, for instance, it is possible to find the likes of A.E. Housman, Lisa Robertson, John Lennon, and Spike Lee consorting together. Sappho stalks the collection (“Because I am not trying to take you from anybody. / If you want to go / all I can do is sing you hotly” from “Sappho as Quantum Bracket”), as do Stein (“a rose is a rose body”) and Dickinson (“no I don’t feel a soul in any rose / not in my body either”) (both from “Sapphic 13”). Robert Frost is everywhere (in the poem “Natch’s Green Fist is Goals” as just one example). There is also often a Rumi-like, “drinks for everybody on me, and the last person standing I’m taking home” sauciness to poems, as in the loose ghazal “That’s My Weakness Now”:
I’m well known throughout the co-ops for being a splashy dishwasher,
And I’m well known in the suburbs for singing to the mayor’s daughter.
Wine is cheaper than books unless you drink it by the bowlful.
I read books hand over hand and my hands are soulful.
Softer than a cloud in a child’s rhyme, your dainty cleaning after love.
Softer than the edges of a fan’s blades furred with dust.
You speak intimate universes to your listeners, then make moue.
Surely no one since Boop has winced at fierier triumphs than Sophia.
The last line’s boastful shout-out to pop cultural icon Betty Boop (did anyone have a poutier pout?) is classic Dahlin: daring , femme and butch, irresistibly winning. Throughout Glove Money, Dahlin dances nimbly among a host of love poetry’s traditions and rhetorical modes, in literary and pop cultures—from the Petrarchan paradoxes of burning and freezing to Sapphic distances (“Why do I like to be across the room // I am sick with love / it has spoilt my pleasure” from “Cup Glass”), from Troubadourian courtly wooing to a kind of swaggering braggadocio. What shines forth in all of the poems is an undaunted élan vital, which is one reason the jouissance in the work feels so, well, real. Here is the book’s closing poem, “Glow Thing”:
What a day to be me, small amount
of baby’s breath, not clover, not moss not
moth not a real baby but the green
small thought of air her mouth
takes in and softly
lets, and I am also
the easy rhythm of these words
Buh buh buh buh
I love earth darkening
I love sky split and
balmy heather, violet
is my favorite, the hue and
girlfriend, at home how, not
rooted in the lovely
dirt rather spread
like young intelligent butter in the bed,
probably writing a poem.
In this poem, as in others in the collection, the poet/speaker embeds the name of her girlfriend, “Violet,” into the text, and it is fitting that the poem’s last gesture of writing belongs to her: a kind of Stein/Toklas gesture that is part sleight-of-hand, part suis generis and generous and genuine belief in the worth of free, shared ardor and abundance.
*
An Indian writer and educator also in San Francisco, Preeti Vangani grew up in Mumbai and spent a decade working in business post-MBA before heading to the states to complete an MFA at the University of San Francisco, where she now teaches. Vangani is the author of two books, Mother Tongue Apologize (2019, winner of the RLFPA Poetry Prize, India) and Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). She too conducts generative workshops for writers, deploying joy as a way of coping with grief. In an interview about one of these workshops, Vangani said, “Growing up, I was never allowed to openly speak about my body, even to my mother. In fact, we had coded names to refer to our genitals. Today, I live with chronic rheumatoid arthritis and often catch myself under-stating how much pain I am in. In poetry, the way we can unabashedly sing about and hold the body that endures so much, led me to building this generative workshop. Desire, sex, sexuality, trauma: how do we hold these in a world where not all bodies are considered equal is what I hope folks will write into through these sessions.” We see Vangani working through these issues in her own poems in Fifty Mothers.
In an Adroit review of Vangani’s first book, Karthik Purushothaman illuminates the forays Vangani makes into poems about a young woman’s mother’s terminal cancer, the daughter’s sexual promiscuity and confusion, and the inextricability of suffering and poetry. “Reading and writing poetry,” Purushothaman writes, “surely can provide the epiphany that could lead to eventual healing, which I like to believe that crafty, cuttingly sincere, and supremely kind Vangani experienced during the course of writing this important introspective work.”
This important, introspective work continues in Fifty Mothers. Why should we expect anything else? Grieving isn’t a one and done process. It arrives and abates, disappears and then reappears in unexpected surges, triggered sometimes by the mostly unlikely things—a stranger’s smile, the ordure of wet earth, an overheard song emitting from the shower stall. Even more so than in her first book, this second collection leans into the reasons why, as her mother began to leave her via illness, Vangani’s speaker became more and more sexually acquisitive and transgressive. Here is “The Cremation I Wasn’t Allowed to Attend”:
My opened hymen, was it wider
or narrower than the slit in the pyre
through which mother was set to flames?
Penetration—my first stage of grief.
Bombay sweat soured under my bulk-
purchase thongs. The city’s gutter overflowing
the way I flooded pretend moans into ears
of hungry boys. The smell of sex
leaking. Every performed orgasm
a rhythmic contraction of muscles
to forget which parts of my baby-soft mother
must have surrendered to fire first.
My earthly heat never more alive.
My body, bent and spent. My body,
fist of her ash;
a gash from fisting.
What else
could I do but keep on disappearing?
As the speaker in Fifty Mothers explores her experience of conflated grief and sexual hunger, its “growl with a belly,” her poems move beyond personal loss to confront Indian patriarchy not only as it played out in her own parents’ marriage (curtained educational and vocational choices for her mother; a dependency on someone to cook and clean that renders the father helpless after his wife’s death and sends him in search of another wife) but also in the culture at large, in which female subservience and rape are prevalent. Facsimiles from the speaker’s mother’s college diary bookend the collection. The page that precedes the collection shows blacked-out maiden names and former addresses, erasures of a less fettered, unmarried self. In one of the five poems in the book called “Fifty Mothers,” Vangani refers to a page we don’t see replicated, on which her mother has written YOU MUST BE HAPPY WITH YOURSELF. “You must be,” Vangani responds. “How do we get here, to a place where happiness too is a chore?”
Fittingly, it is in a poem in which Vangani speaks as the dead mother that the speaker locates that college diary thread of exhorted happiness that will help her begin to escape the labyrinth of anger, shame, and hurt in which she’s been entangled across at least two books. “If you must gin, give it lime,” the mother-speaker says,
& spine, don’t permit grief
to whitewash you
in the suburban gloom
I worked 24/7 to repaint.
Zipline on the rift of my unspent
anger. The unused skillet from my
trousseau shines for you, kiss
the initials engraved on its rim:
P.K.V. Could be me, could be you.
Record the seasons I couldn’t:
isolation, internet, and Instagram
filters. Make me a tiger. Grow taller
than monsoon grass. I’ll walk
through you and nobody will know.
The key, this poem suggests, is to accept that one must sometimes, perhaps most of the time, mother oneself. In the book’s concluding poem, “What This Elegy Wants,” Vangani writes,
. . . Grief, you grumpy mother-in-law,
this elegy is tired of you. As in housewife-tired
as in housewife-staying-quiet-
about-abusive-
husband tired, as in
if my mother were to see me, which I’m certain
she can, as I rummage through the squalor of grief—
through a portal where cream horns are unlimited
and free—she’d continue to snack unbothered
with flakes of pastry sprouting on her chin . . .
The dead mother may not have been as unfettered as even the kitchen cockroach she hunts down with a broom and flings out a window “with a go be free, as if that freeness were hers,” but her belief in that possibility is her daughter’s legacy. The poem ends with another college diary page, across which the poet’s mother has written in loose, playful letters, “You must fall in LOVE With Yourself With pure Soul You Possess.” Fifty Mothers takes up that admonition with great stores of moxie and courage.
Sometimes a poet’s second book represents a big departure from the first, often because a first book may be a collection of apprentice pieces. That these two sophomore collections feel like deepened extensions and expansions of the first books rather than a radical departure is, I think, a testament to the quality of those debuts, which in both cases present remarkably mature and original voices. Each of these poets wields a love language that feels believable. To say so is of course subjective, but it’s worth considering that the word “belief” is cognate with the word “love.” There is plenty in both poets’ new books to charm the masses and the cognoscenti alike.
