About Inheritance

There is a beautiful music in Talia Bloch's work, the kind that both hurts and consoles. I opened this book on "Laughter" and knew there was a deep emotion to in these rhythms. The story of an attempt at marriage that charges these pages with passion and regret, also teaches one how "the invisible separates us." Whether we follow her to Switzerland or to Lisbon, whether we find her alone with a volume of Dickinson or Tsvetaeva on her nightstand, whether she tells us of the many mysteries of difficult love, or considers characters as different as prostitutes, judges, or the China dolls—in this book Talia Bloch reveals the unsaid can be just as powerful as what is expressed.

Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf republic

Talia Bloch’s Inheritance is one of the best first books I have read in recent years. The clarity, simplicity, and honesty of the poems is refreshing and persuasive. Writing without artifice or posturing, Bloch masterfully shapes and paces her poems, exhibiting a sure sense of control while also allowing for surprise. There are no disguises or masks here, just a thoughtful, believable, lyric voice pondering the fragility and impermanence of human relationships, remembering  “…days… when we were the flowers://fragrant and soft, brilliant and brief.” Inheritance is a memorable debut.

Elizabeth Spires, author of A Memory of the Future

“I am a foreign land for you,” says Talia Bloch, and her poems travel hopefully through our distances. Everywhere she finds signs—laughter through a wall, a form glimpsed in a window, doors closed and opened—and she reads them with tenderness, wry caution, and a yearning almost prayerful.

James Richardson, author of National Book Award Finalist By the Numbers