Advice for Lovers : City Lights Spotlight #7

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 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

"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

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.