Join us for an author event for the debut poetry collection from Raquel Gutiérrez, author of acclaimed 2022 essay collection Brown Neon. Raquel will be reading from their collection and books will be for sale to be signed by the author. This is a FREE event to attend, but we ask that you RSVP here or below so we have a good headcount and can prepare the space.

About the book:

Southwest Reconstruction is a disquieting journey through the uncharted dreamspace of memory and loss, expulsion and shelter, family and recognition. Through an eclectic range of forms and echoes drawn from the relational complexities of occupying the difficult terrains of unceded land, these poems are critical improvisations of creation, closures of an imperceptible sense of displacement, and interconnecting routes mapping the vastness of a desire to belong.

Divided into three sections, the text’s vocal registers act as noisy divining rods for kinship and ancestral communication; a sonic brown butch vernacular strumming notes out of sorrow and mettle. Written over the course of almost ten years in the Southern Arizona landscape, these poems function as a psychic Thomas Guide diving into the wreck of settler logics looming large in the rearview mirror of mestizaje and the mythological ruptures left in their wake.