Brown Neon
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders.
Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
