The Sacramento of Desire

Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. 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. In interlocking, essayistic prose poetry, Bloch's third full-length collection mimics the way time skips and lingers in feeling, questioning the norms of reproduction we attach to mandates for social value."Julia Bloch's horologic epic proceeds by chopped narrative, gorgeous musics, casual talk tatters, quote startles, and deep wash-overs, all infected with loss. It's a quest built from the logics of encountering a monstrous fertility-industrial complex. The work stirs and sifts this 'uncompostable grief,' and yet fellow poets, friends, and interlocutors shine behind every line. This book brims with community, crowded and leavened by voices."--Allison Cobb"In this sacramomentous work by Julia Bloch, the moment of a biochemically mediated human is jarred into recognition. It's a new, feminist, queer machinery that pervades, interrupts, and incurs high charges over a necessary tenderness, 'completely waiting for technology to get right down to the center of experience.' 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--'So go not on your nerve but on your last disaster'--an urgent call!"--Sawako Nakayasu