The above line comes from the late Carson’s chapbook, Don’t Watch Me Dancing, swiveling through physical and psychic space in a manner similar to Sandra Ruiz’s formally experimental book, Left Turns in Brown Study. Ryan was a dear friend of mine who channeled his energy unflinchingly into social justice and poetry; he was a student of Ruiz’s, as was I. He studied with Ruiz at Pratt Institute, and years later, I was Ruiz’s mentee and theatre collaborator at the University of Illinois. For those uninitiated with her cross-disciplinary work as a scholar and producer, Ruiz is a poet, thespian, and pedagogue trained in Performance Studies. Eons ago, I recall conducting a one-on-one close reading to Ruiz of Nao Bustamante’s somber performance, “Sans Gravity,” for my Latinx Performance final exam; this necessitated weaving together theoretical arguments, intricately describing Bustamante’s affect, and putting forth, at full throttle, my formed knowledge of Performance and Performance Studies under Ruiz’s teachings. This precision and attention to detail, which Ruiz frequently emitted and expected in the classroom, plays into LTIBS and scores how she describes and defines Brown Study throughout the text. Ruiz builds momentum from José Esteban Muñoz’s decades-long work on Brownness, and all at once brings together grief, institutional loss/trauma, and citation as key elements of Brown Study. Brown Study is a practice that allows for both a necessary break from normal conventions of time, and an alchemic listening with the dead, to “turn left together, not away from one another.” This iterative meditation on loss is a feat worth dialing into and paging through at any desired velocity.

Thinking, knowing, mourning, feeling, and doing do not collapse into textual-atomic-dismay in LTIBS, but manage instead to coalesce. Poetry reads as theory; theory lands in universes, unison. LTIBS eclipses poetry and theory and refuses additivity to instead flow, to be read chronologically and not. It is a book-length gamut written about and by grief. Ruiz finds ways to make shape of the disorder in how one might process death, mourning, and the physical-emotional toll that takes place when losing a loved one: through writing, learning, loving intently.

In Left Turns in Brown Study, the nascent space of a classroom, bookends, the liminal space between life and death, and queerness enter, leave, and then return again to each other. By spanning personal archives and loss, formal and institutional intervention, and by placing a measured intensity onto what constitutes study, LTIBS blazes us into a world of imagining where queer, Black, Brown, and various oppressed populations elucidate what’s possible with a widened sense of education. Footnotes, one of many forms Ruiz employs for the transmission of poetry, call to mind the Muñozian potential of reading and writing together, section by section. Omnidirectional in scope, the book has a cunning surrender to visual and textual alignments where previous academic texts may pick up cues for reinvention via Ruiz’s writerly, experimental approaches to aesthetics. The book was designed by Matthew Tauch of Duke University Press, and Tauch’s font composition, combined with Ruiz’s aesthetic mapping—repetition of the word “TURN” in lower and upper case, for instance—playfully offers a ripple effect which makes imprints and impressions which de-center punctuation, sentences, and traditional writing. One example is a page-long triptych after the “Preturn” section, which precedes the first poem of the book. In part one of the triptych, the word “turn” in lowercase repeats in four rows and 36 columns. Part two of the triptych breaks away from part one, with only one column of the word “turn” and five spaced-out rows. The triptych concludes with an exact copy of part one, leaving the reader with a possible visual map of two towers: stripes, codes refusing legibility. This visual break may represent “spirit topographies,” a phrase from another poem in the book titled, “If We Were Dead.”

Reading this book both in chronological order and outside of Western sequence makes me think of the alt key on a keyboard. Left Turns in Brown Study encourages one to feel, write, teach, access knowledge, think hard, and grieve, but there is a pivotal two-key interplay here, at minimum. Said another way: when thinking about how the alt key literally functions, two different keys must be pressed together in order to activate commands, shortcuts, and open windows. Early in the book in “The Preturn” section, Ruiz halts to go alt and think differently. She reckons with and questions part of the book’s title as she writes:

Referencing two Beyoncé tracks (“Irreplaceable” and “PURE / HONEY”), Ruiz levels out—and breaks from—life/death binaries as well as the limits of identity formation, which locates turning left soundly in the abject. In the 2011 track “Feels Like,” sampled in “PURE / HONEY” and produced by MikeQ with vocals by Kevin Jz Prodigy, the lyrics hark:

“Feels Like,” which itself samples “The Ha Dance,” a 2000 track by Masters at Work indispensable from ballroom, transports listeners through sonic tension, competition, physical dips, electronic drum clashes, and guttural cries that glisten and glow in communion, in community. Echoing Prodigy’s piercing questions, the combined forces of grief, colonialism, time, and death construct an indecipherable maze which Ruiz attempts to navigate throughout Left Turns in Brown Study.

Plummeting through phantoms, Barthes, and morbid textures, Ruiz brings attention to the liberatory space of study alongside grief:

Ruiz further elaborates the intention of this reference in the footnotes, but what more plainly seeps through in this poem, “Juango and Roland,” is a Barthes-like refusal to spell out a punctum and instead offer a glimpse of grief; we may not arrive at catharsis, but time and mourning compose a balm amidst familial loss that Ruiz deploys sonorously on the page. Ruiz’s citation of and engagement with Barthes’ seminal text, Camera Lucida, creates a fragment of memory and pain.

Porous, bountiful, and exacting, LTIBS claims that study is “for those read, or non-read differently, off the page in multiple line-break-sounds & breaths against written words, literate social scenes, and legal worlds.” Given the parsing through and citation of queer theory lineages here, such as from the seminal Muñoz, who Ruiz studied under, I offer additionally the prolific Puerto Rican Salsa icon Ismael Rivera, who sung of “las caras lindas de mi gente negra.” Ruiz works with ongoing theories and literature of Brownness as “a diasporic political porosity across time and space.” Unbound by a singular who or what, she writes for collectives in a sweeping text of institutional critique, mourning, public and personal processing of mass death, and tensions alive in pages of the past.

During a 2012 public conversation between Muñoz and Dr. Vaginal Davis at Tisch, Davis quipped about how the art of the conversation has suffered in the current moment due to an excess of “gadgetry.” Grounded in when the book was written and published, Ruiz’s poem “Friendless” marks and remarks upon pandemic lockdown frenzies of wrought friendship and lapsed correspondence: “Everyone we love is dead. Everyone alive hates living. To hold, to let go, to say I miss you over a dropped call, the feedback–I’m sorry.” Ruiz lands the poem on a stifling end: “are we still (t)here?” Gadgetry feels relevant to Ruiz’s poem since this dependence on technology and its subsequently weakened sense of communication hovers across attempted connection and bonds, flattened from the pandemic lockdown.

Ruiz’s keen play with and invocation of performance in the written word emerges fiercely and ritualistically in her communal poem, titled “I Guess I Forgive You.” In it, directions read: “read without pause; every sound is a space for them.” The poem itself cuts and elaborates:

Found on the first page of the “Return” section is a cosmic signal to the late Pedro Pietri, a co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. Functioning similarly to a play’s stage direction, Ruiz writes:

Pietri profoundly subverted form, teased human conditions, and illuminated the crass edges of societal dysfunction both in his poems, as in “Puerto Rican Obituary,” and in his plays, like The Masses Are Asses. Ruiz’s theatrical detail, which moves time measured horizontally, is a paradoxically brash, bold, and yet self-assured blueprint that precedes an exhilarating endeavor of class critique, institutional grief, spectacle, and specters, all encapsulated for a future that can hold Brown Study and allow readers to bask in it.