Advice for Lovers

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

• Table of ContentsAdvicesI am My Own Big Brother...……………………………………………………………....9Discipulum Amoris………………………………………………………………………10What to Do When Your Muse Becomes Your Lover……………………………………11On How to Transform an Imaginary into an Actual Lover……………………………...12The Real………………………………………………………………………………….13Instructions for a Lover…………………………………………………………………..14On Not Being Able to Perceive Angels………………………………………………….15On How to Transfigure the Body Utterly………….…………………………………….16Haterz Gossip…………………………………………………………………………….17On How to Address Your Lover………………………………………………………...18On How to Blazon Your Lover………………………………………………………….19The Sweet Science of Bruising………………………………………………………….20Re: How Do You Figure…………………………………………………………………21Sloughing off the Gentlemanly Sports…………………………………………………..22Count Yclept……………………………………………………………………………..23Sea Aloe Song...………………………………………………………………………….24Nautitorium………………………………………………………………………………25Aloha Cum Yakuza: Of a Friend that had got Sublimida………………………………..26The Philistine Smitten……………………………………………………………………27Ba Ba Aubade……………………………………………………………………………28Deep Image: To Venus.………...………………………………………………………..29The Wheel of Sheep……………………………………………………………………...30The Real, Purchased on Credit, Does Not Lie Back……………………………………..31Open Letter from the Libertine…………………………………………………………..32To Paris, Begging Boy…………………………………………………………………...33Malediction to the Terrormonger…………………………………………………….......34I Knocked all Tales………………………………………………………………………35You Can’t Freak to Frank ……………….………………………………………………36The Sweet Science of Bruising in Foamy Greek (The Poet Curses Love)………………37My Love of the Silv’ry Thigh……………………………………………………………38Sibyl Song...……………………………………………………………………………...39The Perfect Love Poem Tutorial…………………………………………………………40How to Brag to Your Lover……………………………………………………………...41The Art of Love as Converse…………………………………………………………….42What to Say Upon Being Asked to be Friends……...…………………………………...43Songs of Love of Grief…………………………………………………………………..44On How to Leave Your Lover…………………………………………………...………45NudismsInvocation to Spicer……….……………………………………………………………..47The Urchin……………………………………………………………………………….48Helen Excluded from Heaven…………………………………………………………...49The Orphic Nude………………………………………………………………………...50Year of the Misfit………………………………………………………………………..51Ricky Martin on Homosexuality…………………………………………………………52Re: Live! Virtuous! Redux! ……………………………………………………………..53Dido to Aeneas, Having Left the Cave ………………………………………………….54Aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat horam……………………………………………55Hot Noon, summer had reached its languid height………………………………………56Venus Favors the Bold…………………………………………………………………...57Fuck Me Harder…………..……………………………………………………………...58A Glorious Array of Diphthongs Suddenly Extends My Evening………………………59Complaint to Corinna………………………………………………………………….....60Eating th’Asteroid………………………………………………………………………..61Lenten is Come with Love to Toune……………………………………………………..62Song in the Shade..…………………………………………..…………………………...65Nobaude: the Belle Lettrist’s Idea of Billet-Doux ……………………………………...66Richard Coeur de Lion, or, the Chapeau Will Out………………………………………67Complaint to the Ladies of Leisure………………………………………………………68Poem in Which the Lover is Addressed………………………………………………….69Crunk Apparent…………………………………………………………………………..70Faggot Love Songs………………………………………………………………………71Amorosa Erranza………………………………………………………………………...72The Moon Responds to a Charge that It is Cooling.………………………………….....73Re: Dizzy Cranium………………………………………………………………………74Song of Songs Sonnet……………………………………………………………………75Rime……………………………………………………………………………………...76A Poem of Petrarke to His Skull…………………………………………………………77Our Love Isn’t Dependent on Foreign Oil……………………………………………….78Anxiety of the Bullfight………………………………………………………………….80Lowing the Lay of the Land……………………………………………………………...81Cor, blimey!.......…………………………………………………………………………82Notes……………………………………………………………………………………..83