"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