$17.95

26 pages

First edition: August, 2025

ISBN 979-8-9907346-2-3

The Guides is an investigation into the schools that train guides and the global guide-licensing tourist industry as an arm of the state. The training of readers is also under investigation—since the way one is taught to perambulate through a city or through a book shapes  perceptions of the foreign and familiar, of theirs/ours. There are parallels between migrants and refugees, such as my ancestors, who were escaping antisemitism and ethnic cleansing, and those currently escaping genocide, Islamophobia, and ethnic cleansing. And there are not parallels.  

The Guides, documents visits to the places my ancestors were not from but where they stayed, temporarily, for centuries. In this way it is an itinerary of the irreconcilable, an unwriting. 

Praise for The Guides

Where tourism organizations commodify diasporic longing, The Guides offers a poetics of refraction, shining light through every fissure  and facade in what we incorrectly call history. These episodic ambulations  through Gevirtz’s Jewish “anti homelands” not only call out history’s infelicities and erasures, but also refute it as something lived and shelved. Here  the diaspora is present, vital, at turns needfully unpunctuated—a mesh where staid scripts are the seed of a continually cohering midrash.

— Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly 


Among the many questions posed by Susan Gevirtz in The Guides is this: “Where should those without a homeland go?” Another, related, in this we hear: author become orphan,  protector become predator, tourist become terrorist, place become replace, antiquity become alibi. This feels like necessary music to fortify against the current dangers of language deployed in the service of “nationhood.” Especially so in the face of another haunting question this extraordinary work pushes us to ask and ask again: “Who is not  there?” The Guides is our guide for the present as past, the past as presence, and I don’t think we can do without it.

— Adrian Lürssen


With an irreconcilable eye, The Guides investigates how what we read and what we’re told can misshape who we are. The exigencies of Gevirtz’s personal histories remain unchanged, but reading this text shifts, perhaps uncomfortably, the perspectives of its readers, pointing return is to rhyme, which rhymes might we listen for in a made landscape ‘passed as true’ by language, memory, constellations of the absent? Through Susan’s listening eye (“a figment broken off from the flock”), us to the questions: What do school  and schooling in general bury, distort, delete? And how do we, knowingly and unknowingly, train ourselves to look away?  

— Justin Robinson 



Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat). “Sun Worship,” a section  excerpt from her manuscript Guide School, is a recent chapbook from YoYo Labs (2024). “Doctor Shaman,” another  section from Guide School is a chapbook from above/ground Press (2025). She is based in San Francisco. 

26 pages

First edition: August, 2025

ISBN 979-8-9907346-2-3

The Guides is an investigation into the schools that train guides and the global guide-licensing tourist industry as an arm of the state. The training of readers is also under investigation—since the way one is taught to perambulate through a city or through a book shapes  perceptions of the foreign and familiar, of theirs/ours. There are parallels between migrants and refugees, such as my ancestors, who were escaping antisemitism and ethnic cleansing, and those currently escaping genocide, Islamophobia, and ethnic cleansing. And there are not parallels.  

The Guides, documents visits to the places my ancestors were not from but where they stayed, temporarily, for centuries. In this way it is an itinerary of the irreconcilable, an unwriting. 

Praise for The Guides

Where tourism organizations commodify diasporic longing, The Guides offers a poetics of refraction, shining light through every fissure  and facade in what we incorrectly call history. These episodic ambulations  through Gevirtz’s Jewish “anti homelands” not only call out history’s infelicities and erasures, but also refute it as something lived and shelved. Here  the diaspora is present, vital, at turns needfully unpunctuated—a mesh where staid scripts are the seed of a continually cohering midrash.

— Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly 


Among the many questions posed by Susan Gevirtz in The Guides is this: “Where should those without a homeland go?” Another, related, in this we hear: author become orphan,  protector become predator, tourist become terrorist, place become replace, antiquity become alibi. This feels like necessary music to fortify against the current dangers of language deployed in the service of “nationhood.” Especially so in the face of another haunting question this extraordinary work pushes us to ask and ask again: “Who is not  there?” The Guides is our guide for the present as past, the past as presence, and I don’t think we can do without it.

— Adrian Lürssen


With an irreconcilable eye, The Guides investigates how what we read and what we’re told can misshape who we are. The exigencies of Gevirtz’s personal histories remain unchanged, but reading this text shifts, perhaps uncomfortably, the perspectives of its readers, pointing return is to rhyme, which rhymes might we listen for in a made landscape ‘passed as true’ by language, memory, constellations of the absent? Through Susan’s listening eye (“a figment broken off from the flock”), us to the questions: What do school  and schooling in general bury, distort, delete? And how do we, knowingly and unknowingly, train ourselves to look away?  

— Justin Robinson 



Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat). “Sun Worship,” a section  excerpt from her manuscript Guide School, is a recent chapbook from YoYo Labs (2024). “Doctor Shaman,” another  section from Guide School is a chapbook from above/ground Press (2025). She is based in San Francisco.