Advice for Lovers: City Lights Spotlight #7

Description

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 Gluck "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.

Julian T. Brolaski is the author of gowanus atropolis and an editor at Aufgabe and Litmus Press. Xe studied with Nathaniel Mackey (UCSC), Elizabeth Willis (Mills), and Robert Hass (Berkeley). Julian lives in Brooklyn, curates vaudeville shows, and plays country music with Juan & the Pines. Xe teaches at the New School.

"In this aesthetically audacious collection of poems, Julian Talamantez Brolaski offers xir 'advice to lovers' in unabashedly voluptuous language. This is dithyrambic verse, variously festive and feisty, impudent and sad. It is beautiful, but never serene. And how could it be? The difference between 'seeing to' and 'singing to' is not large, and everything in this book suggests that to advise is to love. In giving it, Julian exercises xir native tongue with linguistic amorousness over a wide range of poetic registers. Guidance has never been this much fun; jouissance has never been smarter." --Lyn Hejinian "'The cure for love is more love,' and the cure for the languishing lyric lies in the architecture of these poems. Julian Talamantez Brolaski's Advice for Lovers builds 'upon the ponderous page' new structures for our most lustful and deviant acts. A highly intelligent form of re-purposed 16-century gestures that rouses the reading body, again and again." --Renee Gladman "The Advice for Lovers poems are less to do with word-creation and more to do with wordplay. They are obedient to the conceit which is their title / which is to say that they are a manual for use by lovers / before during and after the event(s) of love... His sense of love is playful and lustful and full." --Alan Davis, The Poetry Foundation "The stylized writing in Advice for Lovers leaps from off the page with a rarefied 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." --The Volta "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... 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."--BOMB "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." --Big Other "[A] book with power, scope, and dedication to sexuality and 'Love, that god among goddesses' ... There's much to gush over." --The Bay Area Reporter "The copy tags the work 'sexy, kinky, disquieting ... blazes an erotic trail.' And it does so with a pervasive humor that does not make light of but rather sinks the moment deeper into the psyche, where sex, pain, longing and humor all hang out. I'm so into this book!"--Michelle Tea