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

Lila Nova is a thirty-two year-old advertising copyrighter who lives alone in a plain, white box of an apartment. Recovering from a heartbreaking divorce, Lila’s mantra is simple: no pets, no plants, no people, no problems. But when Lila meets David Exley, a ruggedly handsome plant-seller, her lonely life blossoms into something far more colorful. From the cold, harsh streets of Manhattan to the verdant jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula, Hothouse Flower is the story of a woman who must travel beyond the boundaries of sense and comfort to find what she truly wants.

The Poet's Novel provides a unique entrance to the prose and poetry of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including: Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting and action. The contributors, all poets in their own right like, Brian Blanchfield, Brandon Brown, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C.D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprising results.

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"

Born of a country's collective desire for riches, Sacramento was resolute in its survival while other Gold Rush towns faded into history. It battled catastrophic fires, floods, and epidemics to become the original western hub and laid claim to the capital of a state that would one day have the world's fifth largest economy. The community's flourishing growth is not just a product of its economic viability, but a direct result of the cultural vibrance and fortitude of a diverse populace that remains the backbone of our country's most dynamic state.

Selena Townsend has no idea what will happen after she kills a fellow hunter while protecting an innocent vampiress. She's ostracized, but acquitted of charges against her, but now she's looking for her sister who has disappeared. That mission takes her to a vampire club and all kinds of trouble. Atreides has been in charge of the vampire clans, while his brother is off on a honeymoon with his new mate. He doesn't expect a huntress to walk into one of their vampire clubs, which is just not done, and then return later after being savagely attacked by a vampire. He has to take care of her before the League of Hunters learns of it, and then he wants to pawn her off on the hunters who can protect her pronto! But he finds he really doesn’t want to give her up after all. War between the hunters and the vampires could break out any moment unless they find the rogue hunters who are killing innocent vampiresses and the vampire who had attacked Selena and other huntresses at the same time—and terminate the rogues.

THE VIVID, SCANDAL-FILLED STORY OF A SHREWD, RAGS-TO-RICHES MILLIONAIRESS AND THE RUTHLESS POLITICIAN WHO PURSUED HER, TOLD AGAINST THE EFFERVESCENT BACKDROP OF AMERICA’S GOLDEN CITY—SAN FRANCISCO. San Francisco, until the mid-1940s, was a city that lived by its own rules, fast and loose. Formed by the gold rush and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, it served as a pleasure palace for the legions of men who sought their fortunes in the California foothills. For the women who followed, their only choice was to support, serve, or submit. Inez Burns was different. She put everyone to shame with her dazzling, calculated, stone-cold ambition. Born in the slums of San Francisco to a cigar-rolling alcoholic, Inez transformed herself into one of California’s richest women, becoming a notorious powerbroker, grand dame, and iconoclast. A stunning beauty with perfumed charm, she rose from manicurist to murderess to millionaire, seducing one man after another, bearing children out of wedlock, and bribing politicians and cops along the way to secure her place in the San Francisco firmament. Inez ruled with incandescent flair. She owned five hundred hats and a closet full of furs, had two small toes surgically removed to fit into stylish high heels, and had two ribs excised to accentuate her hourglass figure. Her presence was defined by couture dresses from Paris, red-carpet strutting at the San Francisco Opera, and a black Pierce-Arrow that delivered her everywhere. She threw outrageous parties on her sprawling, eight-hundred-acre horse ranch, a compound with servants, cooks, horse groomers, and trainers, where politicians, judges, attorneys, Hollywood moguls, and entertainers gamboled over silver fizzes. Inez was adored by the desperate women who sought her out—and loathed by the power-hungry men who plotted to destroy her. During a time when women risked their lives with predatory practitioners lurking in back alleys, Inez and her team of women, clad in crisp, white nurse’s uniforms, worked night and day in her elegantly appointed clinic, performing fifty thousand of the safest, most hygienic abortions available during a time when even the richest wives, Hollywood stars, and mistresses had few options when they found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Inez’s illegal business bestowed upon her power and influence—until a determined politician by the name of Edmund G. (Pat) Brown—the father of current California Governor Jerry Brown—used Inez to catapult his nascent career to national prominence. In The Audacity of Inez Burns, Stephen G. Bloom, the author of the bestselling Postville, reveals a jagged slice of lost American history. From Inez’s riveting tale of glamour and tragedy, he has created a brilliant, compulsively readable portrait of an unforgettable woman during a moment when America’s pendulum swung from compassion to criminality by punishing those who permitted women to control their own destinies.

The author provides a psychological portrait of Kaczynski and questions the FBI's efforts in uncovering the Unabomber.