Wild and Blue

By Julian Talamantez Brolaski

• Description
• Reviews

• In a new decade-spanning collection, poet and country musician Julian Talamantez Brolaski plunges us into the wake of a spiritual experience, asking what it means to ‘give everything to poetry.’  Julian quits their job and goes wandering across the country looking for a way to live as an artist in the endtimes, to find joy in a time when the climate is in collapse and trans people are being disappeared. The poems form a kind of poetic memoir of life on the road, episodes of a seeker’s journey as they partake of ceremony, prayer, and sojourns into the city and the wilderness. Wild and Blue is a sweeping rumination on wandering, mystical encounters, sobriety, falling in love, and meeting oneself repeatedly across time.  

  
  

• Previous Praise:
  

  • "Brolaski riffs off the eponymous idea of what it means to be a mongrel. . . . Brolaski presents, and seems dedicated to, the kind of experimentation that keeps language evolving and malleable.”
    Publishers Weekly

    "When reading Julian I never know what is going to appear in the next line, what fragments of images and feelings will create a constellation or poem... I go to Julian’s poems because there I so often find this life I cannot see on my own.”
    The Rumpus

    "Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s poetry inhabits the fluid space between cultures, genders and languages — a position from which a poem’s aims become necessarily slippery... Brolaski’s style, featuring run-ons, misspellings and elisions, can disorient a reader, but it also creates fresh associations and surprises.”
    David Roderick, San Francisco Chronicle

    "Of Mongrelitude, his third collection, is as idiosyncratic as his background might suggest. It is a stylistically bold book...it is also an emotionally engaging book, provided one is willing to dial into the formally challenging frequency in which it broadcasts...It is a different way of shoring up fragments, a different way to talk of who you are."
    The Hudson Review

    "Julian Talamantez Brolaski captures the terrain of poetry's future. These poems look backward within Western literary traditions while projecting ahead to what's yet arriving. This is the language of song society and is in dire need of hearing. ”
    Patrick James Dunagan, Rain Taxi