“What we pull from the folds turns back on itself and us. Imagine our frustration at what invites and confronts. Our memories, our dreams, and our desires seem to dance around and against us. It’s impersonal, and it’s not personal, just gone, right in our hands, as utterly social air. Movement is founded on nothing more or less than this, says Sandra Ruiz, if we take our turn, if we study hard and dark, if we ‘never refuse to share.’” - Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur
“Sandra Ruiz’s experiments with form dissolve the boundaries of genre and allow for the incandescence of rage in its theory body to be properly ignited. Left Turns in Brown Study is a manual for reinhabiting the ruthless beauty of our theory, a way into the generative pangs of radical possibility; how we harness the power of our mourning in a time of mass death, and call on the force of ritual as a way to return ourselves to one another and back again, in language and in citation.” - Raquel Gutiérrez, author of Brown Neon
"Sandra Ruiz, in her deeply resonant Left Turns in Brown Study, provides a productively scattered template for how one might begin to document this communal brown melancholia, and in the process, shows us how to walk arm in arm with the dead. In this text, which is both theoretical and poetic, Ruiz’s language holds rigor and beauty in the same palm; and her wrist flickers so that her chosen subjects are held up to us from various, sometimes distorted, angles." - Spencer Williams, Antiphony Review
"The capaciousness of both subject and audience is reflected in the book’s form: Left Turns begs to be read and shared aloud, from front to back, from middle to end, from beginning to middle. . . . Ruiz is a gorgeous and theoretically grounded writer whose work in this text serves as a model for what could be if we wrote without institutional constraints." - Karen Jaime, Centro Journal
"Blurring the line between scholarly book, fragmentary (anti-)memoir, and poetry collection, this book embraces critical becoming aligned with women/queer of color feminism and as a cross-genre, plural, and (pan-)diasporic practice ('foremothers of no singular / land') rooted in urban class consciousness and memory (the haunting “INNER CITY JUICE BOXES')." - Urayoán Noel, The Latinx Project
"Thinking, knowing, mourning, feeling, and doing do not collapse into textual-atomic-dismay in Left Turns in Brown Study, but manage instead to coalesce. Poetry reads as theory; theory lands in universes, unison. Left Turns in Brown Study 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." - Mateo Rodriguez-Hurtado, The Poetry Project
"...the book reaches from the classroom beyond the page—thought first many times, maybe remembered, rehearsed with students, with countless other pages, then landing gently for us to mark how echoes resound if we can stretch to make a page, a mark into repositories of other mediums. The voice you hear can be a familiar outstretched from their new place. This is how one fellow traveler is already hundreds." - Monica Huerta, ASAP/Review
"By rethinking citation, memory, and melancholia as active forces rather than static references, Ruiz offers a vision of knowledge as a field of energy, always shifting, never resting. . . . Ruiz opens new possibilities for the field, positioning brown study as not just a mode of reflection but as a method of mobilization—one that reorients our understanding of scholarship, resistance, and relationality. The returns we make are not simply acknowledgments of the past but acts of invocation, sites of presence that remind us: the dead do not rest, and neither does study." - ethen peña, E3W Review of Books
