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Brown Neon
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 3 reviews on
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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Coffee House Press
- Publish Date: Jun 7th, 2022
- Pages: 200
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 7.70in - 4.90in - 0.70in - 0.50lb
- EAN: 9781566896375
- Categories: • LGBTQ+• Hispanic & Latino• Feminism & Feminist Theory
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About the Author
What people are saying
"Gutiérrez navigates conversations about queerness, survival, and finding home with utter brilliance."
We're all the contemplatives of an ongoing apocalypse. —Etel Adnan
One of the best, most exciting and inspiring books I've read this or any year, @raquefella's Brown Neon—part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree—is out today @Coffee_House_: https://bit.ly/3mqE4yS https://twitter.com/raquefella/status/1534220729775947779
Los Angeles Review of Books
“An essay can’t listen, but these come close, leaving room for questions left unanswered and realities left unlived.” @rachellayown is transported through the boundless terrain of Raquel Gutiérrez’s "Brown Neon." https://t.co/HT0y1TvAGt https://t.co/jFk8U31Pet
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
Winner of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Vogue, "12 New Queer Books to Read This Summer"
The Millions, "Most Anticipated"
Oprah Daily, "Must-Read Books by Latinx Authors"
TODAY, "18 Most Anticipated Latino Books of 2022"
SPIN, "Favorite Titles of 2022"
Electric Literature, "Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of 2022"
Hyperallergic, "Best Art Books of 2022"
Ms. Magazine, "Favorite Books of 2022"
Latinx in Publishing, "Most Anticipated 2022 Latinx Books"
Bustle, "Most Anticipated Books of 2022"
Latino Stories, "Best New Latinx Authors of 2022"
"In these essays by a poet, arts writer, and self-identified 'queer brown butch, ' encounters in Los Angeles and the Southwest with aging punks, border activists, lesbian legends, and others give rise to explorations of Latinx identity, cultural resistance, and the role of art. . . . The landscape cannot be separated from its history of violence, and there is no desert vista 'that doesn't have the uncanny attached to it.'" -The New Yorker
"Singular and inimitable . . . focusing much of the collection on the physical land that has alternately sustained, commodified, and criminalized so many modes of being." --Emma Specter, Vogue
"An essay can't listen, but these come close, leaving room for questions left unanswered and realities left unlived. . . . Ambitious in scope and narrative structure, perhaps most impressive is the way in which [Gutiéeacute;rrez] conquers such disparate terrain . . . to reveal how much connection we all share. There is no way to separate the political from the personal, no wall that could keep us from bleeding into one another. By blurring these lines, Gutiérrez invites us to consider how walls and borders are illusory, arbitrary, and restrictive. Freedom, alternatively, is something in motion." --Rachel Leóoacute;n, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Ferrets out the subterranean forces that fuel relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the land that marks our identity. Whether it is creating a cartography of queerness through family lineage and propinquity or digging through the layers of sorrow, love, and trauma to uncover the true borders and frontiers of our identity, each essay offers a unique consciousness at work." --Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Oprah Daily
"In shapeshifting ekphrastic essays about collisions of fascism with aesthetics, Raquel Gutiérrez maps their own queer Latinx identity with intergenerational historicity, equal parts punk and poetic. A versatile political thinker whose twin backgrounds in arts criticism and zinesterism inform this blazing collection of prose, Gutiérrez shines bright light on the brutal injustice of borders, and elucidates the uncanny violence inherent to desert land art. . . . Dazzling." --Sadie Dupuis, SPIN
"Poet Gutiérrez meditates on geography, gender, creativity, and love in her lyrical debut collection. . . . Written with energy, critical acumen, and ra
What people are saying
"Gutiérrez navigates conversations about queerness, survival, and finding home with utter brilliance."
We're all the contemplatives of an ongoing apocalypse. —Etel Adnan
One of the best, most exciting and inspiring books I've read this or any year, @raquefella's Brown Neon—part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree—is out today @Coffee_House_: https://bit.ly/3mqE4yS https://twitter.com/raquefella/status/1534220729775947779