The poems in "Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana" are a call-and-response. Part translation, part conversation, and part footnote, this collection considers how desire and divinity are intimately acquainted. Tactically, the experience of it is akin to reading someone's private text messages; on one side July Westhale's translations of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. On the other, Westhale's response to them. There is something about both the process of translation and the process of coming into wholeness within queer desire that is akin: the seams of both show. Meaning is made through iteration, then reiteration. Through intimacy with, and intimacy without (other bodies, and people to translate them). At the end, what the reader has is a collection every bit as complex as how Sor Juana described her lovers in "both the bedroom and bullring."

"bright news of gladiolas is a tuning fork, resonating with the electricity of gas stations and underpasses, “the tectonic malaise of boulevards.” July Westhale’s collection is awash in petaled wonder, a “super bloom” of unfolding wisdom and vulnerability. Journeying through California and Montana, rich and arid landscapes, their unabashed poems are “headlights on rural roads when the deepest night turns.” Westhale praises saguaros and citrus fruit in equal measure, their images radiate with strange power. The poems in this collection leave us simultaneously destabilized and riddled with hope, they emit haloes of something bigger than us. Westhale’s lyrics are “beaming and resplendent and prismatic—” “I want to touch them.”

—Rage Hezekiah, author of Stray Harbor and Unslakable

"In this stunning work, Westhale (Trailor Trash) interrogates the vocabulary used to speak about desire, the divine, and literature. Presented as a series of linked lyric pieces, the book spans a range of forms, including lyric fragments, single strophes, and prose poems, gracefully unified by an ongoing concern with the damage done by language, as well as its redemptive potential...With subtlety and skill, Westhale reminds the reader that sensory experience is irrevocably changed once it is relayed in language." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

Winner of 2016 Kore Press First Book Award, selected by Robin Coste Lewis
Trailer Trash is a book about the cotton-country of Riverside County, Southern California, in1980s/90s. A book about poverty, ravaged landscape, and gender, it touches on a fuller, dustier California than Hollywood would have you believe. It is not only a book of class and struggle, it is also a book of triumph, beauty, and constructed worlds. It interfaces with grief and sanctuary in equal measure, creating a deeper understanding of origin stories.

The Cavalcade is a collection of poems that explores what we think about when we think about historical figures. Here, Virginia Woolf explores a rich, inner-personal life—goes to the grocery store, shows desire, considers the literary canon, reimagines her own suicide. Here, the Chilean dictator Pinochet is given the opportunity to consider his actions from inside his casket. Weaving together personal narrative with global events, The Cavalcade truly is a processional of a different sort.