Live! From City Lights

Julian Talamantez Brolaski with Micah Ballard read their poetry on Wednesday, April 18th at City Lights Bookstore, to celebrate the latest release in the Spotlight Poetry Series, Advice For Lovers (City Lights Books) by Julian Talamantez Brolaski.

Inspired by Ovid’s instructional Ars Amatoria, with overtones of Renaissance sonnet cycles, Advice for Lovers is a unique and highly wrought volume of poems. Intricate in form but modern and tawdry in diction, Advice for Lovers walks a fine line between the anything-goes orthography of the Elizabethans and the shifting etymologies of Finnegans Wake. With the inclusion of trans- and third-gender pronouns, the work also argues for a proliferation of pronouns beyond a gendered dichotomy. Divided into two sections, “Advices” and “Nudisms,” the book dispenses wisdom on timeless topics of love like “How to Transfigure the Body Utterly,” “What to Do When the Muse Becomes Your Lover,” and even “How to Leave Your Lover.” Yet in the midst of its classical splendor we encounter more contemporary figures like Johnny Cash, Ricky Martin, and Jack Spicer. Sexy, kinky, disquieting, Advice for Lovers blazes an erotic trail into the 21st century.

Praise for Advice for Lovers:

“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

“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

California-born, Brooklyn-based poet Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011) and an editor at the journal Aufgabe and at Litmus Press. Julian has studied with Nathaniel Mackey, Elizabeth Willis, Lyn Hejinian, and Robert Hass, received an MFA from Mills College, and is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. His dissertation is on rhyme and he currently teaches writing at the New School. He also curates vaudeville shows and is the lead singer and rhythm guitar player in the country band Juan & the Pines. New work can be found on Julian’s blog hermofwarsaw.

Born in Baton Rouge, Micah Ballard studied at New College of California, working with David Meltzer, Joanne Kyger, and Tom Clark. He currently co-directs the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco and co-edits Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.

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