GPS Guest Reader Julie E. Bloemeke featured at the January 2021 Quarterly Meeting.

In Slide to Unlock, Julie E. Bloemeke investigates how modern technology redirects our erotic and familial lives, including phones that open with the swipe of a finger and text messages that move the speaker toward startling self-discovery–the “bright trick of letters” that can ignite memory and desire. Each poem explores the sacred and sacrilege within the large and small worlds we navigate–the chimeric ache of a Georgia thunderstorm, the “unseen union” in a Monet painting, a girlhood bedroom in Toledo, a letter secreted in a Paris bookshop–to reveal how digital language and communication, while designed to create intimacy, can leave us adrift. With a lush, hypnotic writing style at once precise and liquid, romantic and ruthless, Bloemeke presents a topography of all the possible ways to carry another person–to “build /the membrane / body ourselves / into each other”–to unlock the lost art of face-to-face connection, and to free ourselves to be “so so bad in how [we] want.”

Book Author

Julie E. Bloemeke