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Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen is the author of Ecologia (2021), which earned a coveted Kirkus starred review and was named to the publication’s 2022 list of best poetry collections. In 2024, she published her second collection of poetry with Unbound Edition Press, Choke. Her poems have been finalists for a number of prestigious prizes and have appeared in notable anthologies, including The Experiment Will Not Be Bound and New York’s Best Emerging Poets. A graduate of Columbia University, she presently studies Slavic Literature at the University of Michigan.
The poems [in Choke] are an unflinching act of protest, fighting tooth-and-nail for a humanity that history has denied. As they excavate the depths of trans experience, they claw at its oppositions: both obsessed with corporality and in protest of its limitations, weighted by history’s violence yet incited by its flames. These poems summon shadow-worlds of possibility and ask us to imagine a reality where queer intimacy is unquestioned and tenderness has no cost. Each page brings language to its knees, demanding that poetry withstand the weight of love, rage, and history.
Ecologia is on of the best 100 indie poetry books of 2022.
Tonnessen’s poems examine transitions and transformations in all their danger and beauty… It’s particularly moving that the speaker in these poems, so often distracted by porn or TikTok or Netflix, continually achieves lyrical moments of grace that feel utterly authentic, making these seeming dislocations into a connected whole and a beautiful manifestation of her experiences. A well-crafted, tender collection that emphasizes exploration.
Tonnessen reaches all the way for the blue divine—and gets there… [Reminding readers that] a basic structure of desire is the mapping of thoughts and wishes into our bodies, and that such mapping changes everything: wish and memory, movement and body, dream and name. The book’s wild ride finds its poetry in many modes, from the lyrical to the raucous. Go read it…
With passion and precision, ardor and humor, Whitmanian exuberance and Dickinsonian canniness, Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen’s Ecologia springs up from the “wounded place” that is also “holy ground.”
Ecologia is truly a study of the home, equally comfortable exploring the room of the body as it is exploring the room of the mind, though the speaker resides in uncomfortable liminality.
With earnestness and urgency, Ecologia chronicles a transformation, a translation of energy and spirit within the force and fragility of the physical body. The poems process this energy with the momentum of the natural world — a storm surge, a dazed sparrow, a shadow passing over long grasses. Tonnessen does not spare us the brutality of rebirth but allows relief in detailing the humor, the eroticism, and the ordinary, delicate beauty of this life.
