"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.'"--Publisher's website
