Books

The Sacramento of Desire

Sidebrow Books, 2020

The Sacramento of Desire links the vulnerabilities of the body with the economies of assisted reproduction, landscape disasters, and language itself. Julia Bloch’s poems catalog temporal objects—lunar charts, basal calendars, office cubicles, freeway metering—to imagine the possibilities of a queer future beyond the edges of ruin.

Valley Fever

Sidebrow Books, 2015

Valley Fever takes its title from the colloquial name for the desert rheumatism that spreads throughout California’s Central Valley when soil is kicked up by agriculture, oil drilling, and real estate sprawl. The poems deal with chemical clouds and oil country gridlock, and with how a fever changes our perception of the real: Bloch has constructed an angled anthology of altered sonnets whose lines reckon with the long California commutes that inflect the social landscape.

Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Sidebrow Books, 2012

2013 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Poetry

In this sequence of prose poems addressed to 2002 American Idol reality TV show winner and insta-star Kelly Clarkson, Julia Bloch engages an America more willing to choose its next Fox, Coke, and Ford spokesperson than its next elected official.

“Throughout Bloch’s examinations of the multiplicity of boundaries — from the cell walls of the ovum to the architectural, emotional, affective limits put up by society — a quiet insidious toxicity infiltrating the multiple Californian landscapes of this book invades the syntax of a richly swerving language that considers the corporeal desires behind the mechanics and borders of humans as data, as sentences, as reproductive machines, as incubated negotiations of desire.”

—Sawako Nakayasu

“Bloch’s poetry foregrounds the unexpected with a sonic nod to the word we thought would be there. Her poetry’s asking us to attend to our ears and listen beyond the surface of words.”

— Laura Wetherington, 1508

“Valley Fever links language with landscape in tightly constructed poems that depict a rocky, paved-over, and unstable California. The title and cover image of the book … evoke the mood—a mix of humor and hopelessness in the face of environmental destruction.”
— Becky Peterson, The Rumpus

“Julia Bloch’s series of Letters to Kelly Clarkson are less about the American Idol and more about femininity and lesbian desire at large. … Most often, Bloch ties her prose poems to Kelly as a means of leading readers through the ways in which our daily processes somehow reflect the popular media of the day.”
— Andy Emitt, Spin

“A plainspoken codex for LA’s uncanny, where sprawl and hinterland code switch.”
—Amanda Davidson on Valley Fever

On The Sacramento of Desire

rob mclennan’s blog | Write Now Philly | SPD Poetry Bestsellers

On Valley Fever

On Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Selected chapbooks

Like Fur

Essay Press

So swipe while the forgetting’s fresh, swaddle the memory in iron, some locusts, soil? plaster? fat? muscle? marble? pulp? linoleum? a shipping envelope? a nitrogen tank? Underneath the carpet is tack and underneath the tack nails and underneath the nails pine or particle and underneath that hair bone but no more stone look supersweet

Hollywood Forever

Little Red Leaves Textile Series

This huckster body, these
visible vessels,
a red chair breathing.

Anybody can write the Californiad.
Just put one color after another.