Like Fur

Julia Bloch

The prose poems in Julia Bloch’s Like Fur explore the affective structures of fertility. Imitating the starts and stops of memory and wanting, these poems stage an essayistic argument about the complicated desire for queer futurity. Moving through spaces of dailiness and desire (waiting rooms, yoga studios, commuter rails) and shot through with resonant objects of temporality and containment (building materials, lunar charts), Like Fur explores the contracts and contractions of memory and wanting.

“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“

JULIA BLOCH grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. She is the author of two books of poetry (Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Valley Fever), and of four chapbooks, most recently Hollywood Forever, from Little Red Leaves Textile Series. She lives in Philadelphia, coedits Jacket2, and directs the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.