What does it mean to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona, a town where myth, masculinity, and whiteness have long performed a narrative of American nationhood? In Reckon, artist and poet Logan Phillips returns to the fabled site of his childhood to confront the frontier stories he inherited as a boy: gunfights, outlaws, Hollywood cowboys, and the racial and gendered power structures that sustained them. This hybrid memoir blends essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings, and screenplay fragments to examine sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and the contradictions of loving a landscape built on erasure and “slathered in murder.” Moving through the Tombstone of the 1980s and 90s, where daily reenactments and museum displays reinforced a nostalgic masculinity, Phillips exposes a history far more complex than the one he was raised on, and maps how empire and patriarchy shape belonging, narrative, and American nationhood.

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Dirtyverbs.com

 

 

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.

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Raquelgutierrez.net