Description:
Part of being a good squatter is learning to inhabit any space, to find a home in anything. The poems of Gutter, Lauren Brazeal's debut collection, do just this: inhabiting each form given, whether game card pieces, checklists, stolen police evidence, and letters, or redactions, sestinas and sonnets. The story, told from the perspective of a young girl surviving as a squatter on the streets of Los Angeles and based on the author's own experience with homelessness as a teenager, bounces in time and perspective from the not-yet-homeless child, to the panhandling sprite, to the mournful survivor. More than the narrative of a single person, Gutter speaks to the struggles of those who have been cast aside as irrelevant or undesirable by mainstream society.
Brief description: LAUREN BRAZEAL GARZA received her M.F.A. in poetry from Bennington College and is a Ph.D. candidate in literature from UT Dallas. She is the author of the full length collection Gutter (Yes Yes Books, 2018), a memoir-in-verse about her homelessness as a teenager; and has published three chapbooks of poetry, most recently, Santa Muerte, Santa Muerte: I Was Here, Release Me (Tram Editions, 2023), a series of fictional interviews with ghosts. Her poetry, lyric essays, and fiction have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and Verse Daily among many other journals. She currently teaches creative writing at UT Dallas.
Review Quotes:
"Lauren Brazeal's Gutter is one of those books that will haunt me. It's an incredible accomplishment in so many ways: a powerful voice, an unforgettable story, and a profound exploration of survival." The Wild Detectives