Contemporary Authors

• Of Mongrelitude Wave Books (Seattle, WA), 2017

1. Of mongrelitude LCCN 2016033162 Type of material Book Personal name Brolaski, Julian T., author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Of mongrelitude / Julian Talamantez Brolaski. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Seattle : Wave Books, [2017] Projected pub date 1111 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9781940696454 (hardcover) 9781940696447 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3602.R6425 A6 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Advice For Lovers - 2012 City Lights Publishers, San Francisco
• gowanus atropolis - 2011 Ugly Duckling Presse, New York
• No Gender: Reflections on the Life & Work of Kari Edwards - 2009 Litmus Press, New York

• Poets.org - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/julian-talamantez-brolaski

  poet
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  Photo credit: Charles L. Sjölander
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Advice for Lovers (City Lights Publishers, 2012) and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), and coeditor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press, 2009). Julian is a poet and musician who lives in Queens, New York.

• Wave Books - https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/julian-talamantez-brolaski

  Julian Talamantez BrolaskiJULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI
  Bio
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  Current Readings
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, 2009). Julian is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the country band The Western Skyline (http://www.thewesternskyline.org/). Currently in Queens, NY, Julian also sometimes lives in California.

  (Photo credit: Charles Ludvig)
  Tags: Julian Talamantez Brolaski

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/julian-brolaski

  Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  http://www.hermofwarsaw.blogspot.com/
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), and coeditor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books, 2009). Julian is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the country bands Juan & the Pines (NYC) and The Western Skyline (Oakland). He lives in Queens, New York, and he also sometimes lives in California.

• KCRW - https://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/bookworm/julian-talamantez-brolaski-of-mongrelitude

  Talamantez Brolaski's first book of poetry, Advice for Lovers, was devoted almost entirely to love poems. Written while he was in graduate school at Berkeley, he was under the influence of classical Latin and Renaissance poetry. Five years later, his new book, Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books), begins with an invocation to war. Talamantez Brolaski is trans-gender, and he made the transition during those five years. He describes himself as a multi-gendered, racial and linguistic mongrel. The poems chart his journey out of pain, confusion and darkness into a visionary state.

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-talamantez-brolaski-71b40689/

  Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  3rd degree connection3rd
  Adjunct Liberal Arts Professor at Academy of Art University
  Academy of Art University University of California, Berkeley
  Oakland, California 145 145 connections
  Connect Connect with Julian Talamantez Brolaski More actions
  Highlights
  University of California, Santa Cruz
  You both studied at University of California, Santa Cruz
  Julian studied at University of California, Santa Cruz after you started
  Experience
  Academy of Art University
  Adjunct Liberal Arts Professor
  Company NameAcademy of Art University
  Dates EmployedJan 2015 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs 11 mos
  LocationSan Francisco, CA
  • Instruct students in introductory composition, advanced composition, and world literature
  Lunar Chandelier Press
  Copy Editor, Proofreader
  Company NameLunar Chandelier Press
  Dates EmployedJun 2010 – Present Employment Duration7 yrs 6 mos
  LocationBrooklyn, NY
  • Provide editorial feedback to author and senior editor
  • Copy edit and proofread manuscripts in preparation for publication
  PRATT INSTITUTE
  Visiting Professor
  Company NamePRATT INSTITUTE
  Dates EmployedJan 2014 – Dec 2014 Employment Duration12 mos
  LocationBrooklyn, NY
  • Instructed first and fourth-year architecture students in advanced transdisciplinary writing practices
  • Taught fourth-year architecture students in an introduction to literary, critical, race, class and gender studies
  • Instructed undergraduates in creative writing (poetry)
  • Collaborated with faculty on curriculum development
  Borough of Manhattan Community College
  Adjunct English Professor
  Company NameBorough of Manhattan Community College
  Dates EmployedAug 2013 – May 2014 Employment Duration10 mos
  LocationNew York, NY
  • Instructed students in the art of composition and rhetoric
  • Prepared students for CUNY-wide final essay exam
  Ramapo College of New Jersey
  Adjunct English Professor
  Company NameRamapo College of New Jersey
  Dates EmployedAug 2013 – Dec 2013 Employment Duration5 mos
  LocationRamapo, NJ
  • Instructed students in the art of composition and rhetoric
  See more positions
  Education
  University of California, Berkeley
  University of California, Berkeley
  Degree NamePhD Field Of StudyEnglish Language and Literature/Letters, Linguistics
  Dates attended or expected graduation 2003 – 2014
  Dissertation: Rhyme and the Poetics of Authority (Chair, Dr. Kristin Hanson)
  Mills College
  Mills College
  Degree NameMaster of Fine Arts (MFA) Field Of StudyCreative Writing (Poetry)
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1999 – 2001
  University of California, Santa Cruz
  University of California, Santa Cruz
  Degree NameBA Field Of StudyEnglish, with Creative Writing emphasis
  Dates attended or expected graduation 1995 – 1999

QUOTED: "Brolaski's dense linguistic style defies both classification and easy reading, which is likely to alienate many readers."

10/20/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Of Mongrelitude
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Of Mongrelitude
Julian Talamantez Brolaski. Wave, $18 trade paper (112p) ISBN 978-1-940696-44-7
Brolaski (Advice for Lovers) riffs off the eponymous idea of what it means to be a mongrel in this inconsistently
pleasing mishmash of languages and structure. True to this definition, Brolaski's dense linguistic style defies both
classification and easy reading, which is likely to alienate many readers. There's no shortage of indecipherablyjoycean
lines, such as "ta be bridled// paramatrest/ binite adjacon." The poet occasionally contextualizes his obscure references--
for instance, explaining that "Isanaklesh" refers to an Apache deity--but readers must largely rely on their own
interpretations of unknown words. In this way, these poems become especially flexible and welcome many meanings.
Some may argue that this is the whole point: pushing "englyssh" to its borders and creating communications that exist
outside of linguistic evolution. A poem that begins with the Old English sounds of "tho what hath been primordial--thir
fronte, ofttimes in geste," gradually transforms to an ending of, "haha, not w/ that guy anyway." Here is language as
mutt, a synthesis of what came before and what most contemporary English speakers employ. Though its sonic qualities
are apparent when spoken aloud, this kind of poetry may not be particularly enjoyable for many readers. Nevertheless,
Brolaski presents, and seems dedicated to, the kind of experimentation that keeps language evolving and malleable.
(Apr)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Of Mongrelitude." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928092&it=r&asid=bd259f049d4948bae139b4cd7db13614.
Accessed 20 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928092

"Of Mongrelitude." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928092&it=r. Accessed 20 Oct. 2017.

• Poets.org
  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/book/mongrelitude
  Word count: 330

  QUOTED: "Brolaski has a strong musical ear, and the poems in this collection feature various rhythmic voices."
  "Brolaski excels at the sensual."

  book
  Of Mongrelitude
  Author
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  Publisher
  Wave Books
  Year
  2017
  Type
  Poetry Book
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  Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, April 2017)
  Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, April 2017)
  reviewed by Jennifer Michael Hecht

  Brolaski has a strong musical ear, and the poems in this collection feature various rhythmic voices, blending the idiomatic expressions of text messages with the tropes of both rap and Chaucer while addressing the subjects of gender and race. At times the poems read like manifestos, fueled by a robust gusto, but nothing too certain is manifest. Brolaski excels at the sensual: “Suddenly you and your neighbors thighs are pressed together, accidental camaraderie or blunt eroticism. And neither of you move away.” There are many references to popular culture, as in “Melancholy Lake,” a dream poem featuring Brad Pitt, as well as one poem that includes a Hank Williams lyric and another a quote from the Wu-Tang Clan. Brolaski questions human nature and evolution, specifically in poems such as “Against Breeding,” which takes a strong stance in stating “…humans should not continue ourselves / it can only come a frightful cropper.” In the final poem, the speaker tells us that “to write my poem about being a mongrel” it’s required to “jettison my former ire n any gesture toward abstraction.” The tragic 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, is referenced, and the poem returns to the subject of being a “mongrel, mestiza, mixedbreed,” singing itself out in a mantra-like, Ginsberg fashion by concluding “what is love / but a constellation of significances / lyke-like magic / los cavecs nos aüra as the owl augurs / one gapes at a painting / the other waits for mahana.”

  This review originally appeared in American Poets, Spring-Summer 2017.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2012/07/advice-for-lovers-by-julian-talamantez-brolaski/
  Word count: 829

  QUOTED: "rich with rhythms and language so fresh that they are able to transform recognizable forms into wanton, unexpected romances."
  "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?"

  ADVICE FOR LOVERS BY JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI
  REVIEWED BY T FLEISCHMANN
  July 25th, 2012

  The “Dedication to Venus” at the opening of Advice for Lovers declares “I am a love poet, and dedicate all my verses to Love, that god among goddesses, goddess among gods.” Although Julian Talamantez Brolaski marks xir book in this most familiar of poetic traditions, the lyrics that follow tumble and cavalcade into new landscapes, rich with rhythms and language so fresh that they are able to transform recognizable forms into wanton, unexpected romances.

  “O would that I would brim to be so bold / To swim into that icy throne, decanted / With your crotchless chaps, ruthless to behold,” begins one of many recurring sonnet variations. Brolaski occupies an erotic and a lyric role that are inseparable from one another. Xe is a sort of instructor of love, heralding new modes of (queer) sex by mining them out of the past and out of the available language. “How to Brag to Your Lover,” as one poem is titled. “On How to Blazon Your Lover,” “The Perfect Love Poem Tutorial,” and “Fuck Me Harder,” to give a few other examples. And like any good instructor, Brolaski is as quick to critique as to encourage. Xe shifts across spectrums of masculinity and femininity, of top and bottom, in a way that argues for their interdependency. “Let’s this or that, let’s hard and then let’s harder.” Or, “I’ll have you panting while I stroke my whip / And begging while I idly lift my dress.”

  By ignoring and sometimes flaunting accepted modes of gender and sex, Brolaski’s advice extends far beyond any sort of postmodern critique of gender politics. Instead, xe embraces the charged erotic power that is dormant in our poetics and our bodies. We regularly encounter variations on familiar lines, both from elsewhere in the collection and from a wide range of other poetries. “Transcoping this goy’s grist or that one’s scope,” we’re lulled into something recognizable and advised that nothing is recognizable, that everything must be taken on its own terms and invented again. “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love,” as one poem quotes Song of Solomon. It’s an engagement with language that is as rewarding as the lyric qualities are erotic. Paired with Brolaski’s unique, improvisational voice, the collection becomes thick with pleasure.

  Put another way, Brolaski is having fun here, a sexy teacher ready to discipline and be disciplined. Because good sex is fun, after all, even when it’s disconcerting, or challenging, or exhausting. And the act of reaching into poetry and pulling out something kinky should also have some joy in it. The lover, directly addressed, is “Thou / Devonshire-within-reach // You filthy gadabout / Endearinger than a cuscus // Thou diver with a miner’s / Attitude about birds.” The fun makes the poems rollick, pulling us across lines that are so done up in tawdry drag it is sometimes difficult to keep up with their wit. It also, in an emotional topping from the bottom, allows Brolaski to engage honestly with the sorrows that come along with the whole project. The poem “What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends” begins “Why speak of hate, when I do bleed for love?” Elsewhere, we learn that lovers speak of eyes because “It’s the humid beams they rapturate, it’s the vaporous tears they drink in place of sex, it’s the juice and its antidote.” Like in any good burlesque, the sadness and the joy compliment one another, adding depth to both. Somewhat sarcastic, somewhat performative, there is still an emotional core, taut across all the cries of “fuck me harder.”

  “A rose is arrows is eros,” as one poem has it, and who is to argue? Love and lyricism are all the better for their queerness. Brolaski, with a powerfully trans poetic, instructs us on just this fact, cloying power dynamics, pulling hair, and refusing any of the quaint old boundaries. “Darling, I’d eat the sun / If it meant / What I want it to mean,” and you never doubt that xe would follow through on that threat. 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 Volta
  http://www.thevolta.org/fridayfeature-adviceforlovers.html
  Word count: 2006

  QUOTED: "Brolaski achieves endless delight and surprise with reoccurring rhymes and off-rhymes calling out to each other across pages."
  "The stylized writing in Advice for Lovers leaps from off the page with a rarified finesse. Brolaski adopts a modeled tone so distinctly and completely unique, so purposely unfashionable in its daring and erudite deportment that it will leave readers reeling. This poetry doesn’t look for or expect an audience as much as demand the existence of one."
  "Those so heartless as to turn away from this work have not an iota’s worth of the pounding muscle in the chest which Brolaski has relentlessly relied upon in the writing. Quite fittingly this book is not for haters, after all, but for the lovers whom the poems address. Best learn this advice, my dears, and never refuse so true a heart’s measure."

  THE VOLTA: FRIDAY FEATURE

  Advice for Lovers by Julian Talamantez Brolaski. City Lights Publishers. 2012.

  Advice for Lovers

  Reviewed May 11, 2012 by Patrick James Dunagan.

  Shortly into the reading at City Lights Bookstore celebrating the publication of Advice for Lovers, Julian Talamantez Brolaski said “I won’t be reading any of the naughty ones…” Immediately, without intending to interrupt or otherwise disturb, but admittedly not giving it any thought, I piped up from the stairs, “Oh, but you should. Those ones are really wonderful and good!” 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. Without any time wasted, the territories and range of poetry covered and referenced by this collection are clearly staked out. Here are a few lines from the book’s second poem:

  Call me cunt, I am my own big brother,
  Like Hesiod, had he had his druthers

  [. . .]

  That rhyming hazard that you thot you writ
  That fucks folks harder than a free verse can
  Amidst such lines, brazenly tossing out the unabashed gauntlet, Brolaski questions “Why be chaste upon the ponderous page?” This poetry embraces lyric whimsy with the crushing one-upmanship of a seductive eroticism wholly its own, unmatched in contemporary spheres.

  I’ll have you panting while I stroke my whip
  And begging while I idly lift my dress.
  One of the editors of NO GENDER: reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards, the rigidity of received gender categories is of central concern to Brolaski’s own life. And somewhat surprisingly, given the undeniably sexual flair of these poems, to a fair extent Brolaski successfully slips free from this categorization. . In a Q&A I had the pleasure of conducting over email with the City Lights Spotlight series editor Garrett Caples last year (here), he explained that, “Julian’s a third-gender poet who’s coined a set of pronouns and possessives for third-gender reference: ‘xe’ [zi] for subject; ‘xem’ for object; ‘xir/xirs’ for possessives; and ‘xemself for reflectives.’” Brolaski self-identifies by way of a denial of traditional gender descriptors, utilizing a new set of terms with which to identify the sexualized other. Here are several representative lines from midway into “THE WHEEL OF SHEEP”:

  Sheep watch Shirley get sexy drunk and strip
  Shirley strips out of xir sheep suit
  Shirley going at xir buttons

  Amidst fervent bleatings
  Untying all xir laces, Shirley
  Doing something drunk and sexy.

  Sheep tangle till even Yahweh
  Cannot tell sheep from sheep.
  A macho, lusty Bravado zings its way elsewhere throughout the book:

  …it’s on—
  Don’t think I’m siting waiting for your call
  I got action from here to the Caspian
  I couldn’t care if you call me at all.
  That infamously ever-sexualized accessory, the garter, makes frequent appearances in these poems, from “Sheep undoing the garter / Sheep essaying their shears for barter” to the closing lines of “DEEP IMAGE: TO VENUS”:

  I send my song. I lost my joie de vivre
  And so I sing this—since I hate to live.
  Venus, it’s so unruly of the sheep
  To fuck me in the ass instead of sleep.
  Why don’t you come here from out your grotto,
  And take me in the front, and make our motto
  Let’s this or that, let’s hard and then let’s harder,
  Beast at my back, Love at my garter.
  So, too, the directive to “fuck harder” appears multiple times as a favored refrain: “When they do buck and bray in sensate ardor / Bottoming out the sea, fond sailor, fuck them harder.” And: “I’d slash my braids upon the mart to barter / If only you’d come home and fuck me harder.” The two are seamlessly weaved in a mirrored resonant playfulness within the closing of “FUCK ME HARDER”:

  Put me in a suit and call me Mary,
  Transcoping this goy’s grist or that one’s scope.
  Holy monogram, how you like to tease,
  Tender cufflink, I’m hurting for the grope
  That sets my alpha at its churlish ease.
  So strap me to the bed and knife my garter
  Until I’m screaming baby fuck me harder.
  Occasionally, Brolaski’s similes are reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s lyrics; they get a bit too easy: “Your lips are like tulips your teeth are like doves.” However, only a few lines later springs out the strongly assertive: “Your ass is like a cut pomegranate / Exposing its berry fruit. I can’t fit / My fist inside your rosebud Indeed the sex is so vibrantly attractive and alive in the music of these poems that the Biblical Song of Songs offers a proper comparative feeling for the erotic transcendence lifting the work from smut into art.

  The second section of the book, coming after Advice for Lovers, is titled Nudisms and opens with the poem “INVOCATION TO JACK SPICER: SIMILIA SIMILIBUS CURANTUR.” Here, Brolaski asks the now uselessly yet nonetheless lovingly concerned question of the dead poet: “Jack, can’t you see how sad songs / help when you’re sad?” Clearly, Spicer, who from all accounts died of alcoholism at forty feeling unloved, did not get much help from any “sad songs.” While Spicer could tell his imaginary Billy the Kid-figure that “There’s honey in the groin, Billy,” his love poetry was always destined to be lament and never joyous. In too many ways, Spicer’s poetry is a record of his living self-burial within language itself. Spicer quite literally died due to his vocabulary, as Robin Blaser’s now infamous relating of his last words vividly claims. Brolaski is not having any of such nonsense.

  These poems strongly evince a refusal to be so destroyed by language, which for Brolaski remains nothing more than an ever-adaptable tool expertly handled. There’s no concession of power to readers, either. Just as Ricky Martin is quoted (in “RICKY MARTIN ON HOMOSEXUALITY”) as saying “You can put my poster on the wall and think of it however you want,” so too Brolaski willingly and knowingly offers poems without concern for how they’re received. Whatever readers may do, Brolaski’s already hit the intended high marks and moved on. The effectiveness of these poems is never limiting or limited by language. Rather, Brolaski language-use is radicalized in a poetic restructuring of sexuality. These poems are meant to be transformative, accessible, even utilitarian; in fact, many times they declare the need for an attentive response, as in “OPEN LETTER FROM THE LIBERTINE”:

  O horsefall of the quickening sundown—dear rider, they argue I am in love with
  love—not so. Still I can speak on both sides of the question—I can find equivalences
  where there never were… I can take a paramour and make them worthy, tho they are
  prudish. I can love both fair and brown, except I wax lame—I circumambulate the dreary
  sea w/ a bum leg, moaning for my lost Laura. My lovers never say to me, let’s get heavy
  and wet our whistles down upon the grain. They are nothing but letdowns.

  Brute hearts, betake thyselves to the noons half-lit by shades! Get off or get gone!

  Your,
  Pet.
  The good times do roll. Exuberant celebration of sex is everywhere. Brolaski’s teasing authority spins role-playing on its head for both laughs and arousals. Here are the opening lines of “HATERZ GOSSIP”:

  Open your legs when I tell you to, cuz,
  For the haters gossip all over town
  You got the hottest legs in all the biz
  Ride me downtown chauffeur, I’m getting down
  On my knees to suck you off, ah fuckoff
  W/ your hot self & blow me on the couch
  With both an MFA from Mills College in Oakland and a nearly finished PhD from Berkeley, Brolaski has the academic chops to pull off a resolutely joyous turn to scanned, rhythmic verse while embracing a colloquialism of “the streets” that deploys slang as deftly as it invents it.

  Doing dark country till the trough fairly shimmers
  Gold teeth with lilac crush—crunk apparent.
  Once gabardine now frill, knows no crunky
  Cryptozoology, but rather tweets
  And thrills, loose-lineated bacchardi,
  Hennessey’ll man my heartthrob on the streets—
  O slide your mic beneath my bonny mantle
  And hyphe me harder, angel, than I can handle.
  Brolaski achieves endless delight and surprise with reoccurring rhymes and off-rhymes calling out to each other across pages. At times, lines reappear altered slightly, occasionally their near exact beats, words, and phrases are repeated, mirroring in form the storehouse of randy encounters from out of which they gather memories of pleasure to bulk up their content. These poems don’t back away from speaking of things as they are, lowering inhibitions while simultaneously raising the bar on how skillfully poets might embrace and enact an erotics.

  Many young poets demonstrate a blind spot when it comes to embracing the past; often anything beyond the English Romantics (let alone the 20th century or the last couple decades) remains as if in a locked box to which they have no key. In contrast, Brolaski engages everything from the Latin poets of antiquity, to 16th and 17th century versifiers, treating such poetry not as historical artifact but as an utterly contemporary competitor for the affection of lovers.

  The stylized writing in Advice for Lovers leaps from off the page with a rarified finesse. Brolaski adopts a modeled tone so distinctly and completely unique, so purposely unfashionable in its daring and erudite deportment that it will leave readers reeling. This poetry doesn’t look for or expect an audience as much as demand the existence of one. Those so heartless as to turn away from this work have not an iota’s worth of the pounding muscle in the chest which Brolaski has relentlessly relied upon in the writing. Quite fittingly this book is not for haters, after all, but for the lovers whom the poems address. Best learn this advice, my dears, and never refuse so true a heart’s measure.

  ***

  Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in Gleeson library at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book is "There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk": A GUSTONBOOK (Post Apollo, 2011).

  (The Volta | Friday Feature)

• BOMB Magazine
  http://bombmagazine.org/article/7142/blaze-thir-parts-in-englyssche
  Word count: 1469

  QUOTED: "Advice for Lovers situates itself firmly within the Western literary tradition. Establishing a camaraderie with fellow love poets, the poems summon previous poets and their textual beloveds. Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura are present beside both implicit and explicit references to Pindar, Sappho, and Shakespeare."
  "Advice for Lovers effectively and provocatively broadens love poetry’s lineage. Here is T.S. Eliot’s call for invention through and not against literary history. However, Advice for Lovers offers something other than Eliot’s mere filing system formulation of history that, while always complete, is also altered when the new settles beside the old. Instead, Brolaski’s book is a festive mixer and everyone who is a lover is invited to the party."

  Blaze Thir Parts In Englyssche
  by Andrea Quaid
  Andrea Quaid on love poetry's lineage in Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s Advice for Lovers.

  Jill Slaymaker, Fantasy, 5.5. x 9. Courtesy Pierogi Flat Files.
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s Advice for Lovers (City Lights Books, 2012) opens with “Dedication to Venus” and a proclamation, “I am a love poet, and dedicate all my verses to Love, that god among goddesses, goddess among gods.” Immediately invoking Ovid’s apostrophe to Venus in Ars Amatoria, Brolaski’s poem is one of allegiance and ardor. Issuing an invitation to the reader and student of love, the speaker summons likeminded devotees to follow the poet’s lead and expertise: “herkneth ladings, lordes, if you would love, to these advices.”

  The reader’s promised tutelage is twofold, for the newly anointed “disciple amoris” is offered instruction in love and love poetry in all their sacred and profane valences. At once philosophical and sexy, the poet’s enticing edifications assure that the willing pupil will become:

  Learnt in all the lossom ways that love is
  Lernt in that sweet science of bruising
  Which renders lewd, so that at your choosing
  You may yet plot to snare your pet
  Or blaze thir parts in englyssche, or by your very glance
  To hook a hating falconet.

  However, in love poetry this list of different ambitions all take place within the poem. The “plot to snare your pet” occurs in verse and meter as much as the plan to “blaze thir parts in englyssche.” Advice for Lovers’s poetic seduction knowingly occurs via lament, enticement, praise, and reproach. All are come-hithers, all are the “sweet science of bruising,” wholly conjured and lustful and alive in the poetic line.

  In “On How to Transform an Imaginary into an Actual Lover,” the speaker presents a claim: “If you look closely enough at a word, you’ll find it contains its opposite.” The line invokes the love lyric’s traditional conceits of irreconcilable, heartrending conflict. In accord, Advice for Lovers’s poems express love’s impediments and their reconciliation, or lack thereof, and invoke many of the love lyric’s traditional themes—a desired beloved is pursued and captured or lost amid turmoil over rivals and the pulls between chastity and consummation, spirit and body. The thematized tensions are also registered in the lyric form itself, which at once expresses the hope and impossibility of capturing love’s ephemeral charge and of fixing the fullness of always fleeting moments.

  In this and other senses, Advice for Lovers situates itself firmly within the Western literary tradition. Establishing a camaraderie with fellow love poets, the poems summon previous poets and their textual beloveds. Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura are present beside both implicit and explicit references to Pindar, Sappho, and Shakespeare. In “The Perfect Love Poem Tutorial,” the speaker counsels, “Love poetry is about knowing your references,” and makes good on the claim with allusions to Barrett Browning’s melodic measures, Catullus’s erotic arguments, Rochester’s libertine wit, and Wyatt’s wild pursuits. Less obvious love bards Paul Celan, Jack Spicer, and Gertrude Stein join the poet familiars. In the mix are contemporary writers such as Kasey Mohammad, Alli Warren, and Stephanie Young, who are quoted and named alongside popular culture figures Prince and Usher. In this spirit, Advice for Lovers effectively and provocatively broadens love poetry’s lineage. Here is T.S. Eliot’s call for invention through and not against literary history. However, Advice for Lovers offers something other than Eliot’s mere filing system formulation of history that, while always complete, is also altered when the new settles beside the old. Instead, Brolaski’s book is a festive mixer and everyone who is a lover is invited to the party.

  Inextricable from this engagement with literary history is an energetic play with traditional prosody. The book’s innovative sonnet cycle explores its subject in sonnet-inspired verse, prose poems, odes, and ballads. Rhyme plays against off rhyme, and standard verse forms are reshaped from aubade into “Baba Aubade” and “Nobaude,” and from blazon into “misblaze.” Neologisms abound as “hibitions” and “complicateder” skillfully share stanzas with a range of vernaculars that move seamlessly from hearken to haterz, cant to cuz, and writ to wad. Throughout, Brolaski’s dynamic lyricism is on the move and the make, highlighting linguistic and sonic invention. As with the pursuit of one’s objet petit, the language in these poems is restless and driven. In a productive tension with the book’s many concluding couplets, words and phrases seldom rest on a final note and instead generate more language: “a rose is arrows is eros.” In “The Art of Love as Converse,” the initial use of the word “polyglot” transforms in the final lines: “Here’s glot for you: algolagnia. For / the wind puffs our smoke so high there’s never any private . . . even/ Webster has lost its license for the lexicon.” Distinctions between public and private, and masochism and sadism (the footnote tells us that algolagnia may mean either) lapse with Webster’s inability to contain the new uses of language.

  With the sparks of new language comes a revision of conventionally gendered pronouns. In “Song of Songs,” the poet professes to a beloved, “Your lips are like tulips your teeth are like doves / Honey my prowess I take as it comes.” Such addresses to a “you” express the paradox of one’s address to another. As the love poet knows, “I love you” is the most intimate and impersonal of statements, earnest in its performative utterance yet grammatically and libidinally variable in its object. Further, the love lyric’s ambiguous “you,” purposefully or not, obscures the addressee’s identity and often prompts reader speculation about the details. This is most famously exemplified in the ongoing attention to Shakespeare’s thou, thee, and thy. Who is the coveted you? Was he or wasn’t he? Is there one lover? Two? More? Of course, such fascination is intimately and usually morally tied to gender and sexual identity. Brolaski invokes and disarms this history of inquisitiveness by remaking the pronoun, frequently removing the gendered signifier and replacing it with xir, xe, and xem. While retaining a discreteness that does not name names, the x marks a gender inclusivity that refuses to divide into the standard he or she.

  At one point, the speaker asks, “How do you theorize love?” The question resonates throughout the book, with various contrapuntally sung responses. One rejoinder is in “The Real,” which theorizes Love and its corporeal and less tangible manifestations. Invoking the Lacanian Real and imaginatively figuring its embodied symbolization as chin, hand, and heart, the poet speculates:

  See the Real gleams out if its bath
  With a chin like Spartacus
  Mortal desires, the real
  Hand foisting

  The real heart, a jest at call
  And response. Many break when they would seem
  To hang—would a real experiment mean having
  No form to feign to fuck?

  Is the purer love a transcendent love that does not require a body for its expression? Is the greater love one that refuses to be realized in words? An answer arrives in the poem, “Aloha Cum Yakuza”: “Having no form to feign to fuck, Arnaut, / Is swimming gainst the heels.” For Advice for Lovers is a celebration of form—the poem’s, the lover’s and beloved’s body, the pronoun—as transformative pleasure and literary invention.

  Andrea Quaid is a writer and critic. She is a founding editor of the new UCSC Poetry and Politics imprint. Recent critical and creative publications include the American Book Review, aPlod, BOMBlog, Jacket2, Lana Turner, LIT, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a faculty member of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program and California State University, Los Angeles.

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