The Runaway Poems by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs

“For Gabriella Muhs, “love is a pre-existing condition” needed to address the injustices she so powerfully explores in this new collection of her work. These dazzling poems are rooted in the wisdom and witness of motherhood which could not be more timely. What a gift.”
–Demetria Martinez, The Block Captain’s Daughter.

“If you want to see the world as if for the first time, read the poetry of Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, for her awareness, her vision, and imagery are like no other poet’s. These poems shatter and revive; they’ll hold you in a spell of love and language.”

–Patrice Vecchione, The Knot Untied (poems) and Step into Nature: Nurturing Imagination & Spirit in Everyday Life.

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs’s The Runaway Poems explores unremitting trouble with both wrenching compassion and irresistible lightness of touch: Grandmother says “at least he didn’t steal our cows… he only left for a while….” These poems whisper and sing homages and impossible lullabies—for a son in grave danger—for Rosina “away forever/ from her sons…. melted away by guns/ at the green valley apartments…” but especially perhaps for any parent of troubled men—those “nimble tourists of pleasure,/triumphant thumbs of the future,/ trained by gameboy….”  Here is a poetry woven strong of all the irony we crave, that allows us to speak our pain and grieve as well as speak our love and endure.

–Ken Weisner, editor, Red Wheelbarrow; author, Anything on Earth.