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