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