Of Mongrelitude

By Julian Talamantez Brolaski

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Of Mongrelitude is a colloquy on the mongrel body, textual and actual, sexual, specieal, and racial. Composed in a hybrid style, it makes the argument that everything can and does come into ‘englyssh’: ancient and invented languages, european and indigenous, tongues not yet named. All of this ‘made up as medicine’, as ceremony for all creatures, as literal song.
  
  Also available as an audiobook, read by the author.
  
  

• 
  Finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry

• "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

   

• Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books April 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, 2009). Julian is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the country band The Western Skyline. Currently in Queens, NY, Julian also sometimes lives in California.