A review by laura_sackton
Ecologia by Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen

This is a rambling and interesting and mundane and sometimes very beautiful collection. The poems are very long, often five or ten or more pages. Even the shorter ones, a page or two, feel long. They all have very long lines, taking up almost the whole page, though it’s a small sized book. It felt very much like a diary to me, broken into poems. Which isn’t a bad thing. Once I got into it I really enjoyed being carried along as Tonnessen wrote about the ins and outs of her life. A lot of it is about the pandemic and lockdown and being lonely. Also a lot about gender and transition and looking back at her old self with tenderness and kindness, thinking about change, how it happens in the body and also in the brain and heart. A lot about different relationships, friends and lovers, and navigating those during covid. 

A long ramble, one thought bleeding into the next. Confessional, personal, deeply intimate and rooted in Tonnessen's own small life. It felt like…a memoir or journal in verse. Like thoughts broken into lines because sometimes it is easier to make sense of them that way. All the poems were connected and talking to each other. A book-length work. It's also maximalist in this very deliberate way, the length of lines and poems, the refusal to withhold detail, the circling of obsessions and memories.