Description

---

Invoking a Mexican slang term that translates roughly as “white girl,” Güera considers how the body’s meaning as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized surface shifts as it crosses linguistic and national borders. Gaydos’s disarmingly direct addresses slip between the spaces of story and reality, traversing the many meanings of “appearance”: not only the physical image and its attendant assumptions, but also the act of arriving or becoming visible. Moving between Los Angeles, Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Talcott, Virginia, Güera traces the way touristic desire, folklore, and stereotype transform the languages we speak and the bodies we inhabit.

About the Author

---

REBECCA GAYDOS was born in Santa Barbara, California. At U. C. Berkeley, she won the Eisner Prize in Poetry and earned her PhD in English. She has taught literature and writing at Diablo Valley College, San Quentin State Prison, and U. C. Berkeley. In addition to writing poetry, she is editing an unpublished novella by poet Larry Eigner and completing a scholarly book on the significance of technoscientific thought in post-World War II American poetry.

Praise For…

---

"Rebecca Gaydos's crafty yet endearing delivery, along with her intelligent assessments, make for an analytical and affecting read."
— Poetry Flash