Gutter

by Lauren Brazeal Garza

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 panhandler nymph, 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.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2018

About the author

Lauren Brazeal Garza 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 literature and creative writing at UT Dallas and Writing Workshops.

Reviews

[Miggy Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

love this lil gutter guttural book this gob-bag of needles and neon this book's family now you gotta buy this book kid go go go (seriously if you like extreme violets you'll deffo like this)

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about living on the street, identity, and survival.

from We Wrote Villanelles at the Sunrise Group Home for Wayward Teens: "My street witch mother taught me all that separates a house / and alley cat: only one will share a kill with those who might betray it. / No need to suck on cocks, or anything but lollipops. I'll wield / a diesel-powered set of lungs to rip the voice of man clean out."

from Dear Father (Shopping With Your Family of Four on a Saturday Night on 3rd St. Pretending Not to Stare): "You look at me / because you're sizing me up, / because I'm clothes on bones, // because you wonder / what I smell like naked. / I have a gun // I don't know how to use, / a pair of pliers, two shoes, a bag of jewel cases. / I have a lean red hound waking in my stomach."

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lauren Brazeal’s Gutter is a fast melancholy. A destination that seems to have been masquerading as a journey might it paint itself too plainly and be mistaken for a church. Its hunger has power. Is an invisibility brought on by an imagined eating. It devours everything not in its path. You. Me. It is saying we weren’t there. It is saying it knows more than one person whose other tail is a removed tattoo. With erasures that test the boundaries of redaction and checklists that summon the grocer’s gaze of otherhood, Gutter returns to pain its blue doorbell and to desperation, color. As the body, here, makes its moonless bargain with bread, one is best to see it before the angels get to staring.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection was such a good read. It was kind of like the opposite of "Wet" by Carolyn Creedon. Where Creedon felt always distant from the poor folks she wrote about, Brazeal is in the gutter with them, if you will. As a result, the book is moving and real. So many creative forms in here, including a fresh take on the sestina that I would like to try my hand at, and a palimpsest using some of "In Cold Blood." I'm really enjoying this whole read-a-book-in-a-day thing, and "Gutter" in particular rewarded such a practice by revealing the connections, the story, holding the whole thing together.

[Kaitlyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I thought this was a pretty solid poetry collection. Like most collections, I connected more to some poems than others. I think the poet did a good job discussing themes of possession, autonomy, and voice.

I think that sometimes the exploration in form actually took away from the poems rather than adding to them.

[Jose Padua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fresh, powerful, exhilarating work.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gutting! Working through my AWP book purchases (lots of books of friends bought), and wow this collection by Lauren Brazeal Garza of experimental and traditional form in this collection from the perspective of a young girl surviving as a squatter.

Lie by remaining compliant
by remaining silent
by feigning indifference
Turn those lies into oil slick
black boots and stomp stomp stomp
out any trace of what you are
from "How to Reintegrate into Society: A Checklist" (45)

Garza shines in her use of voice, inhabiting multiple experiences, which made me think about how much "I" can embody in a poem (THR just published an article about it too: https://hopkinsreview.com/features/lo...).