The Sacramento of Desire

“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 sacra-momentous 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

“I was reminded, reading Sacramento, of the work of José Esteban Muñoz, especially his writings about queer futurity. I’ve been drawn to his suspicion of ‘normal,’ majority-imposed ways of seeing and feeling time. For him, to be queer was to feel that the present-as-structured is not enough, and so queerness involves existing, feeling, performing, and creating in ways that have not yet arrived, always in a future not yet here. His was a potent teaching that was half frustrated protest and half heady idealism. As Bloch puts it, ‘seeing is a form of wanting.’”—John Timpane, Write Now Philly