2021 Book All Georgians Should Read
2021 Georgia Author of the Year Finalist
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown has called Julie E. Bloemeke’s debut collection “a kind of philosophical love poetry” in which the poet has “located in the body the satisfactions of the mind.” Seductive in its exploration of telephone and screen culture, Slide to Unlock is an unflinching examination of our love affair with tech language, a pointed unraveling of our perceptions of intimacy in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Drawing on place as anchor and point of departure—from Toledo, Ohio, to Paris and Venice—Bloemeke’s poetry is both ruthless and tender, an offering and a confrontation, which the poet Jane Hirshfield has praised as “utterly dazzling.”