This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Raquel Gutiérrez, whose debut poetry collection, Southwest Reconstruction, is out today from Noemi Press. The poet of Southwest Reconstruction drives all night, chasing “starcrossed patterns / hatched across an unaffordable sky.” In the rearview mirror, a “kerosene dreamfire” blazes with violence and longing; ahead lie the identity checks and borders that divide a landscape still “animated / by kinship.” Gutiérrez recognizes other terraforms: the “social sculpture” of identity and family, queer desire, the graves of the dispossessed. Nathan Xavier Osorio praised Southwest Reconstruction as “brutally intelligent and tender,” adding that “these poems bridge ancestry, land, and the queer brown body to trouble the settler at the center of our identities and to imagine the possibilities of a liberated tomorrow.” Jennifer Elise Foerster agreed, writing: “If we are asking how poems can effect healing in a world of heightening structural violence, Gutiérrez’s work can guide us.” Raquel Gutiérrez is the author of the essay collection Brown Neon (Coffee House Press, 2022). Their work has been supported by the Rabkin Prize, a United States Artists fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. Gutiérrez has lived on unceded lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui people since 2016.
Raquel Gutiérrez, author of Southwest Reconstruction. (Credit: Thea Quiray Tagle)
1. How long did it take you to write Southwest Reconstruction?
I started writing poems for this collection back in 2015. I wrote one version for my thesis in 2018. Before leaving her post, the founding editor at Noemi Press, Carmen Giménez, had acquired the manuscript in 2019 for publication. I had worked on edits to my first book, Brown Neon, until my father passed away suddenly, followed by the tragic and temporal disruption that the COVID pandemic produced made any writing—both poetry and prose—and revising impossible.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Aside from grief and more grief, the second most challenging part was sustaining the momentum of clarity needed in order to arrive to where theme and premise intersect. I interrogate moving through different Southwestern landscapes and their attending registers of address that hinge on a genealogy of queer brown desire. It was challenging trying to muster enough energy to create a set of ballads or elegies that consider forms of relational loss, heartbreak, toxic mestizaje, conflict resolution, and, finally, the histories of dispossession that haunt the expansive exteriors of the Southwest as I have encountered them for the last decade. I am very lucky to have received significant fellowships that enabled me contemplate different concepts from a range of texts and place them in conversation with my poems. I would not have, otherwise, been able to heave this final push towards completion without funding.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my home office, often after 8 or 9 PM for a few hours, a couple times a week. When I am working on a long form or commissioned piece, I will take notes for days and weeks, and chip away at a central concept slowly. I like longhand brainstorming. I do write ideas and notes on my smartphone, but if I don’t transfer them from my cloud drive onto a piece of paper with my hand, wrist, arm commandeering the pen then I will seldom remember to retrieve them later. I prefer to see the language emerge from and through my own body. It feels like performance art.
4. What are you reading right now?
Just got back from some travel and the two books I kept in my tote bag were either Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas (Penguin Press, 2021) by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, or The Quick and the Dead (Knopf, 2000) by Joy Williams.
5. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Managing the chronic stress of living in a country that categorically dehumanizes immigrants and their families
6. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
Smelling the infamous slaughterhouse in Vernon, California, while temporarily living with my parents in a nearby Southeast Los Angeles community, mix in with a crisp, marine layer coming off the coastal evening fog in the middle of a SoCal winter. That olfactory memory helped me understand the generative tensions in explicit descriptions of aesthetic feeling.
7. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
I opted for a three-part story that creates the ontological thread through the experimental narrative maxim of I left / I entered / I ascended to gain and produce self-awareness about the marriage between settler colonialism and mestizaje.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Southwest Reconstruction, what would you say?
It is going to get so much worse before it gets better. Sit with the discomfort of your sorrow and find your mettle. Build some structure for maintaining healing and creativity. Give your father some grace.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Southwest Reconstruction?
I was listening to a lot of ambient artists like Laura Ortman, Pauline Oliveros, Tino Gonzales, and Raven Chacon to get into the ethers of the Southwest landscapes grounding this collection. Of course, looking at art is important to making this work. There are also quite a few ekphrastic episodes in Southwest Reconstruction. I considered the works of contemporary queer and Latinx artists such as photographers Laura Aguilar, Amina Cruz, and visual artists rafa esparza, Carlos Almaraz, and Sandra de la Loza.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You have to learn to write when you don’t feel like it.
