Wild and Blue - by Julian Talamantez Brolaski (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The prolific Brolaski is wildly unafraid (as a poet) to pull in a Keatsian, Hopkins-esque, Shakespearean turn of phrase all while being completely devoted (as a songwriter and musician) to the musings of Mother Maybelle Carter, Loretta Lynn, and Hank Williams, Sr. The implications of these nearly out-of-time fusings go back to the Yogananda chant--to be the sky and the drop of water and the ice is to never be a mere body subject to birth and death but to continue deepening creativity as something beyond bodily appearance, as a framework for a very distinct duration that time as a clock perceives/performs magical delusion upon."
-Ken Walker, The Poetry Project

"Brolaski revisits the folk and ballad traditions that shaped the earliest iterations of what we now call country music with a tender respect and fearless desire for expanding the genre's imaginary. Through reproductions of handwritten ephemera and its accompanying audio tracks, Song Book forms a site where queer desire and fugitive queer presence can improvise a new music."
-Anna Rabinowitz, Poetry Society of America

"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 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

About the Author

Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it/xe/they/he) is a poet and songwriter, the author of Wild and Blue (forthcoming Wave Books, spring 2027), and of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). Julian plays in the band Juan & the Pines, and released the EP Glittering Forest in 2019, and a full-length solo album It's Okay Honey in 2023 (both from True West), released with an accompanying Songbook from Wave Books. Julian was the 2023-2024 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in Queer Nature (2022), When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020). Julian is the co-editor, with Crisosto Apache, of The Starry Field: A Gathering of New Two-Spirit and Indigequeer Poetry, forthcoming from Litmus Press in fall 2026.