THE VELVET BOOK (Cornerstone Press, 2024)
2025 Lambda Literary Award finalist
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. Here is a poet who knows and shows us, again and again, that infinities exist in our most immediate surroundings. Within and between the folds of each stanza, Gouirand “wear[s] knowing down/ until it shines.” 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. Velvet over bone, over thought. Velvet conducting fog. 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. Here, Gouirand runs her hand across the nap. “The cloth is / continuous, the bolt generous.” —Richard Siken
Rae Gouirand’s long poem The Velvet Book is a deeply visceral and textured exploration of grief, queer commitment, and desire. Gouirand’s work rejects stasis—both in terms of voice and form. Loss leads to new ways of seeing: “Lucie died & I went up / trusting information. I trust / velvet’s grieving the line. And / everything left stands straight up.” This complex rendering is a powerful rumination on the entanglements between destruction and renewal, love and death… The Velvet Book shows us how to “be intimate with all that we haunt.” —Kaija Holland
ISBN 9781960329370, $21.95 US
Available from Bookshop, Cornerstone Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
ROUGH SEQUENCE (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023)
Selected by Ron Mohring for The Keystone Series, released in a limited edition of 100 copies
$12 US
Available from Seven Kitchens Press
LITTLE HOUR (Swan Scythe Press, 2022)
Selected by Robert Pesich for the 2021 Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest
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 in Little Hour speak with a voice as present and persuasive as weather. —Kathleen Rooney
Little Hour invites readers to be meditative—slowing down to notice the precarious balance between art, nature, and humans by striving to “know every moment of sunlight, every moment of moonlight.” —Annie Fay Meitchik
Available from Swan Scythe Press
THE HISTORY OF ART (The Atlas Review, 2019)
Selected by Natalie Eilbert for The Atlas Review’s Fourth Annual Open Reading Competition
Holy mother of fuck. If Adrienne Rich wrote prose, it would come out something like this. This work is more powerful to me than Twenty-One Love Poems and that. is. saying. a. lot. — Lidia Yuknavitch
The History of Art is wide open, complex, dirty, clean, revelatory, and flat-out amazing. — Daniel Mahoney
The parts that art destroys are the histories that stand in the way of remaking, a woman unconstrained by canonical control who knows, and even becomes, her own pleasure. This is a new history of art. — Barrie Jean Borich
$15 US
OUT OF PRINT / originally available from The Atlas Review
JINX (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019)
Selected by Ron Mohring for The Summer Kitchen Series, released in a limited edition of 49 copies
$9 US
OUT OF PRINT / originally available from Seven Kitchens Press
GLASS IS GLASS WATER IS WATER (Spork Press, 2018)
Gouirand pushes at gaps, from the chasms words create (that which uttering them and composing them renders in the body, heart) to the inevitable ruptures of coupling (both in love and in the syntactical act of joining signifier to signified). There is light and potential in these gaps. It’s hard to describe these poems adequately in a single way, hard to describe the strange miracle of this poet’s work without flattening the experience or launching into philosophical outer space. In reading her, I understand in my body and am moved. My brain is piqued and my ear hums. In writing her, I lack the right words. —Rachel Mindell
Rae Gouirand’s newest collection continues the tradition of poetry by lesbians adumbrating lesbian experience into US politics. Gouirand’s poems about ambivalence toward marriage in the post-Obergefell world continue this work with exquisite beauty and insight. —Julie Enszer
ISBN 9781948510165, $18 US
Available from Spork Press, Powell’s, Open Books
MUST APPLE (Educe Press, 2018)
Selected by T.C. Tolbert for the Oro Fino Chapbook Award
In Must Apple, Rae Gouirand writes a world that stays and can never stay into a prolonged, if not perpetual, being. A grandfather stringing beans, the skin of a persimmon turning—the sharp edge of her language-knife takes what could be mundane and skins it with light. These poems make me want to be a more careful writer and a more attentive human eating from and breathing with this world. What I’m trying to say has already been said better by a friend of Tu Fu in the eighth century: Thank you for letting me read your poems. It was like being alive twice. —T.C. Tolbert
ISBN 9780996571678, $12 US
Available through Powell’s & Amazon
OPEN WINTER (Bellday Books, 2011)
Selected by Elaine Equi for the Bellday Prize for Poetry
Winner of an Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry & the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the Audre Lorde Award, the California Book Award, & the Montaigne Medal
These poems possess a quiet urgency—an elegant, stark beauty. The speaker wonders “What minimum: can I say.” The line “radiates/its own idea of bareness.” The sentences are prisms conjugating light. 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, Final Judge
I can think of no poet’s first book in recent years that has given me as much pleasure as Rae Gouirand’s Open Winter. Gouirand repunctuates the world in stops and starts as she reaches toward new ways to parse the complexities of love. Open Winter shows us how language breaks and fails, how poems repair and revive. –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. The sense of scale—infinitesimal to vast—is capacious as mind itself. A complex innerness gleams through the cracks of the language, the white space between syntaxes: an interruption that sings. Open Winter offers a shimmering geometry of cognition in visionary poems that witness the erotic ligatures between self and world. It is a generative—and deeply generous—book. –Alice Fulton
ISBN 9780979337642, $14 US
OUT OF PRINT / check availability from Amazon, Open Books, + Powell’s
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