Brown Neon

April 15, 2022
How do we map the terrains of love, land, and art? In this debut essay collection, poet, critic, and educator Gutiérrez, who is based in Tucson, Arizona, engages these questions through stories of the borders that bind and those that break. The author divides the book into three sections--love and kin, land and movement, and art and labor--and these three arteries contribute to a "relational map--to make, see, and share the worlds we could actually belong to if we could sustain the intimacy." Gutiérrez shows us the work involved in sustaining such intimacies, with the relational maps taking on a variety of forms, including a queer family tree; a constellation of arts and performance spaces; a road trip in search of kin and connection; and encounters and reencounters with friends and lovers on the street, in the gallery, and on the dance floor. The author also delves into multiple forms of grief, bearing witness to the death of a beloved mentor, navigating various terrains of desire and heartbreak, and engaging with the wounds resulting from layers of erasure and dispossession throughout the Southwest U.S. and northern Mexico. Gutiérrez shows how their own body is also a map, binding together space and story. This mapping emerges not just through physical movement, but also through memory, history, and love and desire, providing the author and readers with "the privilege of knowing our way back home." Through these points of encounter, borders--between states, countries, bodies, and identities--are created, imagined, encountered, and transgressed. When crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, Gutiérrez writes, "I am a brown neon sign: aimless aging homosexual hipster with attachment issues." While the text has a tendency to meander, readers who stick with it will fine a bold and brave debut collection from an intriguing new literary voice. A probing, tender reckoning with space, place, and identity.

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April 25, 2022
Poet Gutierrez meditates on geography, gender, creativity, and love in her lyrical debut collection. She has a knack for writing about art: in “Vessel Among Vessels: Laura Aguilar’s Body in Landscape,” she muses on the photographer’s work capturing shots of regulars at “Plush Pony, a bar in East l.a. that catered predominantly to working-class Chicana lesbians,” and “Baby Themme Anthems: The Werq of Sebastian Hernández” is a fascinating look at the life and performance art of the author’s friend: “Sebastian wants to fuck shit up.” In “Behind the Barrier: Resisting the Border Wall Prototypes as Land Art,” Gutierrez recounts a trip to Mexico to visit border wall prototypes and ponders how “art literally builds fences.” “On Making Butch Family: An Intertextual Dialogue” is an account of Gutierrez’s relationship with lesbian activist Jeanne Cordova, a “father”-like figure for the author. Though Gutierrez occasionally veers into an academic tone (as when she describes one artist’s work as expressing an “ontology of the ordinary”), for the most part this is notable for the author’s sly, acerbic wit: a job at a university “only existed because of an endowment, and when Wall Street’s down so is gender and women’s studies.” Written with energy, critical acumen, and raw emotion, this is as memorable as it is original.