Liner Notes

From Los Angeles to Heidelberg, Jerusalem to Venice, Belém to Half Moon Bay, the poems in Liner Notes range across borders, inhabiting each place they land with great tenderness for its vivid particulars. These are worlds cared for passionately, felt with every sense and fiber. “I have been here before we arrived,” Knobloch writes, and Liner Notes maps for us a world where every place can be known and loved as if it were always home.

—Dan Alter, author, Hills Full of Holes

Emerging from “ancient grief” arrives Knobloch’s gaze upon a fragile and teeming landscape. By her hand, the desert wails and whistles, rituals sit atop fault lines, and precarity and beauty reign at once. “Do we go up because we need / another mountain,” the poet asks, and she rises to the vista point, her voice lush and longing, to collect the voices of all those sons and daughters who have ascended, lost, and returned to see again.

—Rachel Kaufman, author, Many to Remember

Julia Knobloch seeks redemption through travel and articulates with clarity what it feels like to be adrift in the between-lands. Her migratory instinct is at once public, personal, and political; her phrasing, declarative, but filled with quiet emotion, and her poems are a mix of feminism and Jewish wisdom.

—Carine Topal, author, Dear Blood [KJ1]

Julia Knobloch’s Liner Notes is rooted in time and place in the most expansive sense. Moving fluidly across years and continents, the poems here evoke the largest movements in the smallest moments, leaving a trace, a record, of associations, a series of echoes and images that add up to a vivid tapestry. Wise and understated, playful and astute, this is work that creates its own form.

—David L. Ulin, author, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles

[KJ1]Comma here intentional part of the title