VIA NEGATIVA

In this stunning work, Westhale (Trailer 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. “I am not a star. I am not a star. I am a mechanical. I mean, her. I mean. Dear god,” she writes in “SAINT AGATHA: PATRON SAINT OF BELL FOUNDERS, WET NURSES, RAPE VICTIMS, BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS, AND SICILY.” With subtlety and skill, Westhale reminds the reader that sensory experience is irrevocably changed once it is relayed in language. The provocative poems are frequently voiced by visionary speakers: “Broken like a double-yolk/ in a skillet, I have found/ vision, o lord, I your weary/ chef coming off the graveyard/ shift.” Here, the poem reads as a corrective gesture, an attempt to restore mystery to our lives through language. Westhale delivers a book full of mystery, beauty, and possibility. (June)

"Westhale’s willingness to be vulnerable as a poet allows the reader to find not reflections of their own experiences, but meaningful resonances that engender a powerful connection between Westhale and the reader." Michael Mercurio

Via Negativa named one of the most anticipated queer books of June 2020: "I am heartened to see a cadre of new LGBTQ books that are offering readers necessary historical perspective, righteous anger, & much needed humanity. " William Johnson, Executive Director

"July Westhale remains a poet of the highest order and ‘Via Negativa’ is an exquisite, spellbinding achievement."

Diriye Osman, author of Fairytales for Lost Children

"I love the surprise of these meditations on creation – how joy rises up inside “flesh-failings;” how desire continually creates a “a vow of silence but a throat of song.” This is the deity I’ve wanted to know: one of “plural-silence." And how thankful I am to have found July Westhale's Via Negativa, a fellow seeker, in language I love: "all/engorged, all surrendering.” I am ever grateful to her for creating the queer-poem-church we’ve needed inside a 'sentence small, eternal, hushed.' "

TC Tolbert, author of Turning to Hear the Last Leaves of Stargazer Fall

"July Westhale is a shapeshifting poet of desire and violence, grief and forgiveness, trauma and loss transformed by resilience. After her gorgeous debut Trailer Trash explored the intricacies of class and gender, Via Negativa deftly weaves the sensual with the spiritual, reckoning with a religious inheritance and a powerful faith in pleasure, engaging in bold lyric conversation with the divine. These deliciously subversive poems range from California fires to church pews with equal parts grace and swagger, always charged with eroticism, rooted in the body, showing us again and again "the wildness of ourselves.” Via Negativa left me breathless."

Diana Whitney, author of Wanting It

"When catapulted, flying free, you know it is poetry! July Westhale's "Ars Poetica" will renew your idea of how a poem stands in midair with the lush brilliance, where yes, dodgeball and love align forces! I want this collection in our lives! Westhale beautifully recalibrates our understanding of a footnote as only a poet could reimagine!"

CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

"Here are July Westhale’s new poems: where death smells like "waterlogged Pall Malls"; where a “freshly laundered” pickup truck idles outside the window; where a ravished young woman tramps to the kitchen in her “birthday body,” opens “the vault of the refrigerator” and rests her head on “the cool rationale of a cantaloupe.” These poems are dizzying, erotic, fiercely intelligent, and, in the best ways, many-minded. Via Negativa is a book by one of our finest young poets, fully present in the world, attuned to the dark mysteries of language and insight." Kevin Prufer, author of Churches