Advice for Lovers

by Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Inspired by Ovid's instructional Ars Amatoria, with overtones of Renaissance sonnet cycles, Advice for Lovers is a highly wrought volume of poems. Intricately formal but saucy and contemporary in diction, Advice for Lovers walks a fine line between the anything-goes orthography of the Elizabethans and the shifting etymologies of James Joyce. Sexy, kinky, disquieting, Advice for Lovers blazes an erotic trail into the twenty-first century.

"What if I'm spirited away to live in a torch song?—Where the landscape is a lover's discourse? Julian Talamantez Brolaski has me in thrall! In this enchanting book, Julian jacks up the artifice and jacks up the feeling." –Robert Glück

"Advice for Lovers is the type of book that makes you see language with fresh eyes, challenging you toward something fiercer and more honest yet. It leaves you bruised and aching to be bruised again, and isn’t that what you were asking for after all?" —The Rumpus

Author of gowanus atropolis (2011) and editor at Aufgabe and Litmus Press, Julian Talamantez Brolaski studied with Nathaniel Mackey, Elizabeth Willis, and Robert Hass. Xe rejects gendered pronouns and lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at The New School.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

98 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2012

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brolaski’s distressed and gilded englyssche can go “Hellespontine onna Trojan sibyl” but knows how “to be a common man in a dent truck.” It also knows that form’s for feigning, feigning fucking, and “to feign—not to fuck a form, Arnault/Is making shoddy deals.” Don’t let the four-letter fun fool you though; the advice here is really how “to hold a thorny thing tenderly,” salt mixed with sweet in “surly chivalry,” and to swoon without forgetting that “Love poetry is about knowing your references.” In the “sweet science of bruising,” Brolaski’s Einstein, test sheep, prof and champ: “Honey my prowess I take as it comes.”

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Truly, these poems—all those in the book—are great, the naughtiest ones just happen to also rank among the most superbly supple display of an embrace of lyric language to be found in the work of any contemporary younger poet. Brolaski's gifted play of alliteration and syllabic deft shines with this collection. The power is immediate and raw."

-Patrick James Dunagan


"Sensuous in dawn, daylight, dusk and night, Julian's new book Advice for Lovers is a primrose-rich , self-indicating rite of passage that in order to progress, must pass well through itself."

-J/J Hastain

[Max Urai · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems have the kind of Nabokovian, Joycean, Lorrie Moore-ean fun with words that they make you notice that the authors last last name is an almagation of "bro" and "lass" - which is appropriate, given that xe is genderneutral/genderqueer and really plays on all (not just both - all) sides in the game of desire. The poetry is sometimes more witty and funny than truly erotic - there's no dripping anything, really - but they are very sexy and just great fun all around. I feel kind of drunk after having finished this.

[Carrie]

Dirty, but somehow really intellectual too. If you're getting hot while remembering Ovid, something unusual is happening...

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of poems.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moral of the story: This collection made me want to be in love.

This is a lovely collection of poetry about amorous love I read for the Skoden Readathon. I really enjoyed the prose which was very lyrical and beautiful, though I do want to deconstruct it a bit more in future rereads for how many literary/classics references it had. I also really loved the use of neopronouns to make the love described uniquely queer and ungendered for the most part which was very refreshing.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 B867a 2012