Raquel Gutiérrez (She/her/they/them)

Sarah M. Vasquez

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez's first book "Brown Neon" was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic. "Brown Neon" was a 2023 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Lesbian Biography/Memoir. “Southwest Reconstruction” is their first poetry collection. Gutiérrez has lived on unceded lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui people since 2016.

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Communities: Arizona Author, Tucsonan, LGBTQ+, Gender Nonconforming, Hispanic or Latinx

Books:

Southwest Reconstruction

Poetry
Noemi Press
December 2025
ISBN 9781955992695
Paperback, 0 pages

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. More/less