A probing, tender reckoning with space, place, and identity.
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.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-56689-637-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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