Julian Talamantez Brolaski is a poet, country musician, and scholar whose work brings rhyme, historical language, song, and linguistic play into close contact. the historical archive published Brolaski in Issue 31 under the name Julian T. Brolaski and earlier in Issue 20 under the name Tanya Brolaski. The contributor note for Issue 31 explicitly connects those names, recording that Julian T. Brolaski wrote the blog Swimming for Dummies under the pseudonym Tanya Brolaski.
Brolaski in the historical archive
Issue 31 published “gowanus apocalypse” and “liquid sunshine.” Issue 20 had already published two pieces from Madame Bovary’s Diary under the Tanya Brolaski name. Read together, the appearances show a recurring interest in unstable diction, literary inheritance, comic pressure, and the way older language can be made strange again in a contemporary poem.
Rhyme and poetic authority
Rhyme is also part of Brolaski’s critical practice. The Bagley Wright Lecture Series has presented “The End of the Line: Rhyme and the Poetics of Authority,” a lecture on end rhyme, formal constraint, and the problem of poetic believability, followed by work on rhyme in medieval poetry. the archive’s guide to rhyme in poetry opens that formal question into a wider account of sound, pattern, syntax, expectation, and closure.
Advice for lovers, address, and form
Brolaski’s Advice for Lovers, published by City Lights in 2012, gives love and address an explicit place in the bibliography. Set beside the poet’s sustained attention to rhyme, the book title creates a natural path toward rhyming love poetry, where recurrence, desire, expectation, and formal return are considered together.
Books and current work
Brolaski’s books include gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), and Sunwise (Wave Books, 2026). Poetry Foundation also identifies Brolaski as a poet and country musician. Readers moving from this the historical archive record into a wider field of living writers can continue through contemporary poets.
Further reading
Current biographical and bibliographical information is available from Wave Books and the Poetry Foundation. Brolaski’s lectures on rhyme and poetic authority are documented by the Bagley Wright Lecture Series.