The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove

The Tinder Sonnets is about how women—or one woman, at least, since their speaker, someone close to LoveGrove herself, likely stands metonymically for many contemporary women—see men. The picture isn’t pretty: the poems reveal behaviour on a spectrum that ranges from violence and sex that imitates porn (on the apparent omnipresence of choking during sex: “Just / assume breathing is optional now”) to emotional disengagement, ghosting, and general shittiness. I’m surprised that the woman in these poems keeps trying, but she does: “It’s embarrassing to still hope / to be loved.” That hope, a desire for sexual and emotional fulfillment, animates these poems. Otherwise, they might not exist.

This book isn’t as simple as that description might lead you to believe, though. It’s playful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and clever. Structurally, as its title promises, it’s a book of sonnets: contemporary ones, without rhyme, sometimes with and sometimes without the Petrarchan division between octave and sestet. Those sonnets are gathered into groups of three—triptychs, as LoveGrove explains in the book’s notes. “The sonnet itself was often historically dedicated to romantic love, mostly from a patriarchal perspective,” LoveGrove tells us. “Using it today as a space in which to explore contemporary sexual and relationship behaviour and misogyny—from the point of view of a middle-aged woman—felt particularly, irresistibly, apt.”

“Using it today as a space in which to explore contemporary sexual and relationship behaviour and misogyny—from the point of view of a middle-aged woman—felt particularly, irresistibly, apt.”

LoveGrove’s use of the sonnet form isn’t the only playful thing about this book. The cover image, a collage by Kate Sutherland, along with the collages by LoveGrove herself that divide The Tinder Sonnets into sections, suggest that these poems can be read as collages. In these poems, the speaker’s dating life exists alongside descriptions of minerals, elements, and medicinal plants. Those juxtapositions suggest witchcraft, perhaps, an idea that’s both supported and disavowed by the first sonnet’s discussion of the uses of Angelica archangelica: “Used as protection, women grew it to / prove they were not witches and to ward off / unwanted male attention.” Note the bold line break dividing the infinitive “to prove,” which suggests something about the speaker’s (or the poet’s) confident willingness to break rules. LoveGrove’s notes mention her use of “various Oulipian constraints,” and the inclusion of plants and minerals might be one of those. Another might be the way the triptychs are sometimes organized, with the lines in the first sonnet rearranged, in a seriously playful and playfully serious manner, in the second sonnet, and then rearranged again, more freely, in the third. The way the poems shift voices, too, line by line and sentence by sentence, is another collage-like feature. Perhaps the men in them become a collage representing bad behaviour, too. Oh, my brothers, we can do better.

Given all of this, what do the poems look like? Take “Stibnite, house of antimony: dating as aversion therapy,” which sets the speaker’s date(s) against that mineral’s literal and legendary uses:

Protects from unforeseen circumstances,

though not from married men or narcissists.

Boosts courage in expressing your feelings

though not to polyamorists or cheats.

Brings commitment, eases transformation

from middlebrow to MILF to misanthrope.

I chose these lines because I laughed at the alliterative shift they depict—under the circumstances, who wouldn’t become a misanthrope?—and because they display the speaker’s emotional vulnerability, her lack of interest in married men or those practicing (or pretending to practice) polyamory. The sonnet concludes with a set of WHMIS instructions for handling stibnite (“Do not let it touch skin. Do not inhale”), which immediately become instructions for handling a relationship, and then something else:

Do not call first. Do not respond quickly.

Do not exhale. Do not ask questions. Take

a breath. Take a joke. Take it. Take it, bitch.

The speaker’s internalized rules shift to the ones imposed by the man she’s dating, which become more and more misogynistic. I’m not seeing any consensual dominance play in the repetition of “Take” and “Take it” in the final lines, just a demand that the speaker accept the unacceptable which reflects the contrary instructions of “Do not exhale” and “Take / a breath” and the prohibition against asking questions. In the kind of relationship this man wants, the speaker cannot win. No wonder the poem’s title references aversion therapy; this man would put anybody off relationships for good. The speaker doesn’t become a victim, though, and the poem resists the man’s demands by repeating them; any shame here rebounds onto the man the speaker is dating, which is where it belongs.

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. If the rest of LoveGrove’s writing is like this, I’ll be reading more of her work.

Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of the Giller Prize–longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, as well as three poetry collections: Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award), I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. She is currently working on a new novel, and creative nonfiction. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and Squirrel Creek Retreat in rural Ontario.

Publisher: Book*hug Press (April 7, 2026)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 132 pages
ISBN: 9781771669665

Ken Wilson

Ken Wilson is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. His first book is Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; his second, Walking Well, will appear in 2026.