In This Tender Geography the poet Cindy Williams Gutiérrez offers a series of carefully crafted meditations on love and loss. The poet remembers loved ones in a series of elegiac poems and offers a series of odes to dear ones that are still with her. These poems offer a chance to consider our own relationships, and to think about how we fashion, tug, tear, and sometimes mend the web of life as we traverse it. Love is what renders us alive, the poet argues; the fullness and ripeness of life arrives when we offer love and when we are loved in return. In a brilliant sequence titled, Remedies, William Gutierrez offers a variety of cures for as many ailments. For example, for "Forgetting the ancestors" she suggests a walk among weeping trees. And for "A broken heart" she advocates mending a split-rail fence. This book, full of inventive forms and gratitude, is a sort of remedy itself for when we need a dose of beauty. Thank You, Cindy, for your words, for the care and tenderness you have poured onto these pages.
Claudia Castro Luna
Author of Cipota Under the Moon and Killing Marias. Washington State Poet Laureate 2018-2021.
Cover Art by Jessica Salazar McBride