Brown Neon: Essays

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. (June)