Julian Talamantez Brolaski is a poet, country musician, and scholar whose work brings rhyme, song, historical diction, queer and Two-Spirit experience, and linguistic play into a highly distinctive contemporary poetics. Across books, lectures, and music, Brolaski treats language as something inherited, sounded, altered, and lived in the body.
gowanus atropolis
gowanus atropolis, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2011, builds a dense urban lyric from the Gowanus landscape, altered spelling, archaic echoes, sonic pattern, and verbal invention. Place becomes a field where ecological damage, desire, history, and language continually reshape one another.
Advice for Lovers
Advice for Lovers, published by City Lights in 2012, turns the address to a lover into a flexible poetic form. Rhyme, erotic language, wit, tenderness, command, and inherited lyric conventions move through poems that are acutely aware of the long history of love poetry.
Of Mongrelitude
Of Mongrelitude, published by Wave Books in 2017, explores mixed identity, indigeneity, gender, language, ancestry, and resistance through a poetics of hybridity. The book’s title names mixture as an active condition of language and selfhood, allowing different histories and registers to coexist within the poem.
Sunwise
Sunwise, published by Wave Books in 2026, extends Brolaski’s poetry into the territory of song. Lyrics, musical structures, vernacular speech, and poetic form meet across a book shaped by the long relation between verse and singing.
Rhyme and poetic authority
Brolaski has developed a sustained critical practice around rhyme. The Bagley Wright Lecture Series includes Brolaski’s lectures on rhyme, poetic authority, formal constraint, and medieval verse. These investigations clarify why rhyme in the poems carries intellectual force as well as musical pleasure: repetition can establish expectation, complicate authority, and make inherited language newly audible.
Country music and performance
Country music forms another major part of Brolaski’s work. Brolaski performs with Juan & the Pines and has released music alongside the poetry. Song gives rhyme, refrain, voice, and audience a different physical setting, connecting the literary page with performance and vernacular musical traditions.
Identity, language, and tradition
Brolaski’s scholarly and poetic work engages indigeneity, mixed-race identity, queer and Two-Spirit experience, trans life, resistance, and the cultural work of language and song. Earlier English traditions, medieval forms, contemporary speech, and Native and queer experience can occupy the same poetic field, producing a literature shaped by historical depth and continual transformation.
Where to read Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Brolaski’s official website presents books, music, and current work. The Academy of American Poets provides poems and bibliographical context, while the Iowa Writers’ Workshop documents Brolaski’s poetry, music, lectures, and awards. Readers can continue with contemporary poets, rhyme in poetry, and love poems.