Gutierrez's poems illuminate parallels between a personal sense of indigenized identity and the legacy of colonialism via the California Mission system and its impact on the local ecology.

"Our people need new prayers from our first tongues. NUEVA CUENTA shows that a soul in its lucid wandering is both the presentation of mathematical brilliance and visceral mystery; that the poet is the incarnation in a circle of instructors who crafts reminders that origin is future and every line of our story is food for beauty and resistance. Here is a song to take with you on our fight for liberation; to take with us on all of our returns to earth and essence. Be fit for the run...rise en masse."—Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of SOMEONE'S DEAD ALREADY (Bootstrap Press, 2015)

"In Freddy Gutierrez's poetry, language skips and repeats like the past, in all its disastrous beauty, in order to sing a new future into being. He sings for himself and always others. In NUEVA CUENTA, a song of the land emerges, the story of European arrivals and indigenous resistance, the particularity of plants, the pain of history, the possibility of recovery, and the dream of a world that could be otherwise."—Stephanie Young, author of URSULA OR UNIVERSITY (Krupskaya, 2013).

Poetry. California Interest. Latino/Latina Studies.