Description
Choke, Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen
$25.00
ISBN: 9798990614109
Fine Softcover with Dust Jacket; 100 pages; 5”x7.5”; Includes photographs
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Summary
In this bold follow-up to her celebrated debut collection, Ecologia, Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen pushes her once prayerful voice into a full-throated war cry. Choke offers a daring fusion of experimental poetry and a fictional scientific study, creating a disorienting and mesmerizing exploration of identity, desire, and the relentless scrutiny faced by trans people.
Tonnessen’s verse pulses with raw emotion and linguistic innovation, defying conventional approaches to evoke a visceral, bodily response. Her poems – flowing water and shattering glass, alike – create a kaleidoscopic lens, through which she examines body, memory, and transformation with unflinching honesty and disarming tenderness.
Interspersed throughout are clinical “research reports” – Tonnessen’s own biting satire of objectification and medicalization – along with photographs of the author as studied subject. These fictional documents serve as a stark counterpoint to the deeply personal poetry, highlighting the disconnect between private experiences and public observations.
Choke is more than a collection of poems; it offers an immersive journey into the complexities of existing in a world that is simultaneously fascinated by and hostile to trans bodies and experiences. Tonnessen’s unmistakable voice, honed in Ecologia and now refined to a razor’s edge, cements her place as one of the most vital and innovative poets of her generation.
Prepare to be challenged, moved, and utterly transformed by this groundbreaking work that defies easy categorization and demands the readerly courage to be experienced.
Author
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. 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.
Praise for Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen
“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.”
Caroline Harper New, author of A History of Half-Birds
“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… [Her] sprawling poems often employ pauses or unfinished lines, sometimes to convey wry or fraught understatement. The speaker works her way from anguish to a deeply felt sense of spiritual union … and 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 Anfin Tonnessen’s Ecologia springs up from the “wounded place” that is also “holy ground.” I don’t know when I’ve read a debut collection with such panache and such depth. Tracking the poet’s transition, this book discovers tremendous vitality in its gorgeous and invigorating openness to change. Here’s an entirely original contribution to the mosaic of American poetry.”
Peter Campion, poet and literary critic, and author of One Summer Evening at the Falls and Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry, among other collections.
“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. This first collection of poems by Tonnessen holds a Heraclitan tension on the topic of transition. From shifts of body, to shifts of love, to shifts of work, from shifts of diction and syntax, from shifts of lyricism to the more linear, this collection culminates them eruditely and with inspiring grace.”
David Tomas Martinez, poet and author of Hustle and Post Traumatic Hood Disorder
“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. This book reminds us of what it is to inhabit a body, to live with uncertainty, to hurt and to heal, and it resonates with the humble magic of resilience: And the grace in falling too, as rain comes to rescue. / How many times have I been buried, and come back again?”
Carey McHugh, poet and author of American Gramophone
