Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, into the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Julian Talamantes Brulaski.

Several years ago, I read Julian's second book.

It was called Advice for Lovers.

It was published by the City Lights Books People,

and I found it to be an absolutely extraordinary book. I don't know if you read

poetry, but if you do, you may have noticed that people don't write love poems very much.

And this is an entire book of them. It's not just love poems,

their lust poems, and their lewdness poems, but they are based more or less on classic love

poetry, on Ovid and on Renaissance poetry. You can hear in this book, bits of Shakespeare,

the sonnets. It's incredibly beautiful. And so I've been waiting and waiting for a new book to come out.

The new book is called of Mangrelitude. And it's published by Wave Books, another one of my favorite publishers of new poetry.

So first, I wanted you to hear what a couple of the poems sounded like in advice for lovers by my guest, Julian Talamantes Brolowski.

First there's a dedication. It's a dedication to Venus.

I'm a love poet and dedicate all my verses to love.

...