Excerpt
This huckster body, these
visible vessels,
a red chair breathing.
Anybody can write the Californiad.
Just put one color after another.
Reviews
“Valley Fever manages to infuse its language with political urgency in a manner that maintains subtlety and and avoids preaching. This is important poetry that both entertains and resonates with contemporary culture. I am eager to discover what Bloch will write next.”
—Becky Peterson, The Rumpus, October 24, 2015
“In the procedure of Valley Fever, Bloch destablizes the center of many poems, a formal choice that enhances the tension between context and concepts.”
—Heather Bowlan, make/shift
“Bloch’s poems refuse the possibility of comprehensive documentation.”
—Davy Knittle, Iowa Review, June 23, 2016
“A plainspoken codex for LA’s uncanny, where sprawl and hinterland code switch.”
—Amanda Davidson on Valley Fever
““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.”
—”Deep Listening As An Act of Resistance,” Laura Wetherington, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, March 2, 2017
“Julia Bloch’s Valley Fever is funny and contemplative, clever and sincere. Much of the book was written while she was living in Los Angeles and commuting to teach in the eponymous Central Valley, but the poems are imbued with a dreaminess that stretches beyond her immediate surroundings. Bloch conjures images that are ethereal and hazy, but her writing is sharp and incisive; hers is a landscape I never want to leave.”
—“On Our Nightstands,” Sarah Arkebauer, Public Books, September 28, 2015
“Bloch’s short lyrics have an incredible compactness. To call her poems “quirky” or even “surreal” might do them a disservice, but both elements exist in Valley Fever, alongside a deep earnestness, a wry self-awareness and an engaged critique of everything she observes.”
—Review on Rob Mclennan’s Blog, May 24. 2015
Praise
“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