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Laurie Ann Guerrero’s expansive fifth poetry collection, REDWORK, is a meditation on a woman’s role in work and family, ancestral wisdom, and the subversive nature of female art. Interwoven with eight images of the author’s intricate redwork embroidery—striking red thread on light textiles—these poems explore reproductive justice, violence, gender dynamics, internalized sexism, and mothers and mothering, bound by the belief that “the red thread ties me, like a vein, to all my mothers.” From a paradigm-shifting slap at a Brownies troop meeting to eating a rattlesnake to a great-grandmother rising from her coffin, Guerrero’s precise, visceral voice threads the imagery of embroidery through unexpected forms. Rhythmic stitches echo in her repetitions, leaving phrases that stay with the reader: “How quietly our trust began.”
REDWORK is a love letter to the women who came before, a cry against gendered violence, and an elegy for the ways colonialism warps our lives.
Price: $18.99
Pages: 96
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Imprint: Autumn House Press
Series: Autumn House Press Poetry Prize
Publication Date:
13 October 2026
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781637681244
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
POETRY / American / Hispanic & Latino, Modern and contemporary poetry / poems, POETRY / Women Authors, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Family, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Places, Poetry / poems by individual poets
"Laurie Ann Guerrero’s REDWORK is a book that’s simultaneously lyrical, tactile, visual, and inhabited by a voice that’s razor-sharp and finely honed. Like the most precise needlework, these poems thread their subject matters—birth, death, eating rattlesnakes, the violences of American life—into an Art that is moving, vivid, and transformative." —Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route “‘. . . Red of shock, and the red of love. . .’ writes Laurie Ann Guerrero, inviting the reader into the interior world of reproduction through verse and embroidery but also the process. REDWORK asks: Whether human or idea, how will I give birth? The answer: Embrace each step, stitch, skin cut, season, doubt, departure, and unexpected approach. Trust one day, you arrive. ¡Felicidades!”
—Ana Castillo, author of My Book of the Dead
"REDWORK reminds us that the seams of love for family, for soulmate, for self, are vital but precarious—comfortably tight one day, regrettably loose the next. And just as thread serves for mending, the vibrant language of her poems strengthens our resolve toward healing, and for learning to accept our weary, tattered hearts." —Rigoberto González, author of The Book of Ruin
Poet, essayist, and visual artist, Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the Southside of San Antonio. Poet Laureate of San Antonio (2014-16) and Texas (2016-2017), her collections include Babies under the Skin (Panhandler, 2008), A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), A Crown for Gumecindo—a collaboration with visual artist, Maceo Montoya (Aztlan Libre Press, 2015), and I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New & Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2021). Guerrero holds degrees from Smith College and Drew University. She is an Associate Professor and the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.