Advice for Lovers

"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