Poetry. LBGT Studies. 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. Through these letters, Bloch disassembles the faux-political phenomenon of the Fox Network reality TV smash hit, invoking critical questions about celebrity, democracy, femininity, and desire, as well as the mass cultural corporatization of the female body. LETTERS TO KELLY CLARKSON takes up these issues in poems that combine the intimacy of the epistolary form with the sonic intensity of verse. Employing formal methodologies aimed at interrupting and foregrounding the cultural politics of that intimate address, such as cut-ups, aleatory practices, non-narrative prose techniques, and parataxis, these poems mediate the tensions between local pleasure and global capital through the desirous and politicized spectacle of the pop star. "As Julia Bloch turns her razor-sharp gaze to American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, she adopts the beseeching tone of a fan and the intimate address of a best girl confidante. All women know what it's like to be watched, but for Kelly, it's that scary feeling upped a notch, like the viewers' eyes have been pumped full of steroids. The gaze works both ways: the ghost of Kelly Clarkson follows Bloch everywhere, from San Francisco girl bars to Midwestern family reunions. For all their complexity of diction, there's a touching simplicity to Bloch's poems. By taking Kelly seriously, on her own terms, Bloch moves beyond the safety of 'camp' into a realm of genuine tragedy and love. It's a stunning collection."—Dodie Bellamy

Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Literature & Fiction

Bloch, Julia

Poetry

Sidebrow Books

Sometimes the word "lyric" seems to appear everywhere: either it's used interchangeably with the word "poetry" or it attaches to descriptions of literature, art, film, and even ordinary objects in order to capture some quality of aesthetic appeal or meaning. Lyric Trade is not yet another attempt to define the lyric, but instead it digs into how poems use lyric in relation to race, gender, nation, and empire. Engaging with poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim, this book asks: What does lyric mean, and why should it matter to poets and readers? Lyric Trade argues that lyric in the postwar long poem not only registers the ideological contradictions of modernism's insistence on new forms, but that it also maps spaces for formal reimaginings of the subject. &nbsp;

Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem (Contemp North American Poetry)

History & Criticism

University Of Iowa Press

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "VALLEY FEVER continues the strange, unsettling pilgrimage Julia Bloch began in her first full-length book, the Lambda finalist LETTERS TO KELLY CLARKSON. It's the Central Valley of Steinbeck and Cherríe Moraga, altered here by Bloch's own quizzical, dreamy, poetic line and her vision of history as the thing that pins us down at all times, even when we feel most free. California landscape infects all who set foot in it: 'Darkening stems / of the lower plants— / you'll find me listening / for them to collapse in this heat.' Bloch's 'I' is intrepid, valiant even, but even she quails at the beauty that assails her, at the onset of a 'fever' at once romantic and bleak, 'because most people are not adults.' With her apothegms, her 'place-based lie,' and her subject position (as skeptical as it is warm- hearted), Julia Bloch enacts the restless, guilty implicatee as well as, or better than, any American poet."—Kevin Killian

Valley Fever

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

The Sacramento of Desire

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bloch, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bloch, Julia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bloch, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem (Contemp North American Poetry)

Valley Fever

The Sacramento of Desire