Overview

"When stargazing, certain phenomena can only be seen with peripheral sight. I'm reminded of this fact by Rae Gouirand's long poem The Velvet Book, whose indirect engagement with subjects yields true vision. Love, death, the past, what might yet be possible, what a self is and is not-all are strung together here like sumptuous, light-shot gems, and the couplets that carry them flow easily as brook water, page into page into page. This book is a beautiful experience. -Christopher Nelson By turns measured, sharp, slippery, and ecstatic, Rae Gouirand's The Velvet Book is a stunning achievement. With a studious, prismatic eye (and ear), Gouirand attends to the sumptuous and mysterious folds of velvet, of the space between what we wear and who we are, of the overlap between interior and exterior. Ultimately, this book is a learned, generous, and queer meditation on commitment, on ""the question of how to stay/and then how to allow for drift,"" on the marriage between the self and the other that finds itself in language and the body of the beloved. -Brent Armendinger The Velvet Book is restless, it refuses to settle. Under the cover of velvet, dreaming velvet, it feels its edges and disorientations, its zones of endlessness. Here, thought rustles and deepens, velvet-tongued, and moves us to impossibly dizzying places where everything touches. The Velvet Book is heartfelt, questing, sumptuous-a meditation on grief and love and their textures, on what is and isn't possible to promise, on what it means to be a fully available living self. -Richard Siken"

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9781960329370

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Reviews

"What a pleasure it is to listen to an ""I"" who never forgets that we're all part of a ""we."" Rae Gouirand's poems speak with a voice as present and persuasive as weather. - Kathleen Rooney Rae Gouirand writes a world that stays and can never stay into a prolonged, if not perpetual, being. These poems make me want to be a more careful writer and a more attentive human eating from and breathing with this world. -T.C. Tolbert These poems possess a quiet urgency-an elegant, stark beauty. But there is also an unsettling quality to this work that continually questions itself and resolutely insists on remaining open to possibility and fluctuation. I'm deeply impressed by the strikingly original combination of delicacy and rigor-the seemingly effortless way the focus shifts from outer landscapes to ""the sky we have inside."" -Elaine Equi Gouirand repunctuates the world in stops and starts as she reaches toward new ways to parse the complexities of love. -Mark Wunderlich Rae Gouirand's poems glow with motion and stillness, the richness of consciousness, as they delicately enlarge the boundaries of comprehension and desire. -Alice Fulton"

Author Information

Rae Gouirand is also the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (2018) and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, 2011), the chapbooks Rough Sequence (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award, 2023), Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, 2019), and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition, 2018), and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (winner of The Atlas Review's Open Reading Competition 2019). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Bateau, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, Michigan Quarterly Review, [PANK], Quarterly West, The Rumpus, Spinning Jenny, Under a Warm Green Linden, VOLT, ZYZZYVA, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis.

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