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**PREORDER** Southwest Reconstruction
by Raquel Gutiérrez
$18.00
Synopsis
Southwest Reconstruction is Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut poetry collection, a disquieting journey through the uncharted dreamspace of memory and loss, expulsion and shelter, family and recognition. Enacting an eclectic range of forms and echoes drawn from the relational complexities that occupy the difficult terrains of unceded land; these are critical improvisations of creation and closures of the imperceptible sense of displacement, and the interconnecting routes that map the vastness of desire to belong. Divided into three sections, the vocal registers in Southwest Reconstruction act as the noisy divining rod for both 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.
Blurbs
With Gutiérrez’s queer shoulder to the rueda, these poems drive all night to arrive in the desert cities of our unbecoming. In their transit, they gather with great care and attention each mile marker’s descanso, while dropping the desert balms of mugwort and creosote. Lyrical, elegiac, fiercely alive and existing at the cultural intersections of a settler mestizaje, these poems move monsoon-quick with allusion and reparative histories. In the downpour and flash flood, the dedication line, como Art Laboe, is always open. Calling upon the artworks of Laura Aguilar, Sandra de la Loza, Amina Cruz, and rafa esparza—their collective wrecking crew and southwest reconstruction—Gutiérrez is curator and curanderx in these extraordinary poems that hold us to the fire and urgency of decolonizing embrace.
Brandon Som
author of Tripas
In Raquel Gutiérrez’s electric Southwest Reconstruction, the serpent of the Interstate-10 sews together Los Angeles’s Slauson Avenue with Tucson’s sentinel saguaros and the wandering West Texas plains, breathing to life an infrastructure to counter the imperial specter of El Camino Real that haunts the imaginary of these poems. Flexing a sonic and imagistic agility that invokes colliding English, Spanish, and Caló speaking worlds, Gutiérrez offers mineral, contaminant, data, and flesh at the altar of the colonial wound to insist, “to be unwanted is an origin story.” Brutally intelligent and tender, these poems bridge ancestry, land, and the queer brown body to trouble the settler at the center of our identities and to imagine the possibilities of a liberated tomorrow.
Nathan Xavier Osorio
author of Querida
Raquel Gutiérrez’s stunning collection locates us in the borderlands of the Southwest—wherein rock, water, mineral is not separate from body, culture, politic, kinship, sexuality, labor, art, or eros, and where human rights violations and rampant social inequity have reached increasingly alarming levels. If we are asking how poems can effect healing in a world of heightening structural violence, Gutiérrez’s work can guide us, disrupting, through unchained and exacting syntax, the infrastructures of capitalism and conquest, and returning us, across dazzling and sonorous linguistic terrain, to the possibility of love and belonging. Southwest Reconstruction is the music of deep resistance.
Jennifer Elise Foerster
author of The Maybe-Bird
