This Tender Geography by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez
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
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
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
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez is one of my favorite contemporary poets. Her work tenderly explores the deep geographies of family, friendships, the environment, and human-animal relations. Throughout, she maps the thresholds of loss and love through carefully crafted narratives and haunting images. Every page feels like an ocean of emotions breaking open; at the same time, every page is “one wing opening.”
—Craig Santos Perez, 2023 National Book Award Winner for Poetry and author of From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
Like putting pushpins into a map of longing and desire to find her way home, Cindy Williams Gutiérrez's This Tender Geography is a book of attention, precision, and wonder. Her hold on the subjects of illness and death is poignant. Her care for the subject of love is pierced with wonder. Some of this book’s poems are entangled in passion. Others move toward restraint. But, all the poems in this wonderful book glow with Gutiérrez’s evocative lyricism and graceful intensity.
—David Biespiel, National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award Finalist and author of Republic Café
In This Tender Geography, the poet Cindy Williams Gutiérrez offers a series of carefully crafted meditations on love and loss. 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. In a brilliant sequence titled, Remedies, Williams Gutiérrez offers a variety of cures for as many ailments: for “Forgetting the ancestors,” a walk among weeping trees, and for “A broken heart,” mending a split-rail fence. This wonderful book, full of inventive forms and gratitude, is a sort of remedy itself for days when we might 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, Washington State Poet Laureate (2018-2021) and author of Cipota Under the Moon
If, as they say, when a dear one dies a whole library of stories has burned, then this book turns that lament to abundant creation—telling stories of the lost so they return to us, summoned by these poems. Cindy Williams Gutiérrez conjures family, story, and healing thought from the shadows in the spirit of “say it all now.”
—Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate (2018-2020) and author of As the Sky Begins to Change
Poet-dramatist Cindy Williams Gutiérrez was awarded the 2018 Willow Books Editor’s Choice Poetry Selection and a 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship for Inlay with Nacre: The Names of Forgotten Women. She was selected by Poets & Writers Magazine as a 2014 Notable Debut Poet for the small claim of bones, which placed second in the 2015 International Latino Book Awards. Cindy received the 2017 Oregon Book Award for Drama for Words That Burn. In 2022, she co-produced her choreopoem, In the Name of Forgotten Women, which was acclaimed by Portland’s Willamette Week as “a vibrant call for action.”
Cindy has taught poetry to youth in every grade from K-12 in Washington and Oregon and is currently a teaching artist at Paschal Sherman Indian School on the Colville Reservation. She is cofounder of El Grupo de ‘08, a Northwest collaborative-artists’ salon; Los Porteños, Portland’s Latinx writers’ collective; and the Confluence Poets in Washington State’s Methow Valley. Along with an MBA and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Institute, Cindy earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast Program with concentrations in Mesoamerican poetics and creative collaboration.
Cindy is inspired by the silent and silenced voices of history, herstory and her own story. She dreams of the day when history will expand into our story.
If, as they say, when a dear one dies a whole library of stories has burned, then this book turns that lament to abundant creation—telling stories of the lost so they return to us, summoned by these poems. Gutiérrez conjures family, story, and healing thought from the shadows in the spirit of “say it all now.”
—Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change