BROWN NEON

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.