Open Winter

by Rae Gouirand

WINNER OF THE 2011 BELLDAY POETRY PRIZE These poems possess a quiet urgency —an elegant, stark beauty. The speaker wonders “What 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 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, and I can think of no other poet whose descriptive abilities are as acutely tuned to the gradations of atmosphere-cold, stars, qualities of air and light and celestial bodies. Gouirand breaks with common syntax and 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. The most reticent stars can be seen only if you look to the side of where they shine. Open Winter uses this slant approach to access areas of perception and feeling that only can be reached obliquely. A complex innerness gleams through the cracks of the language, the white space between an interruption that sings. These fragmented, oscillating lyrics consider a terrain between nameable states, a site of incipience as well as boundary. “There is nothing not plural” Gouirand writes, and her lines implode with echoed words, a corrugated grammar that unfolds under our eyes, emergent as song or breath. “Ink kindles, heightens, takes its final place,” she notes, in lines that beautifully eulogize inscription. 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.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 2011

About the author

A queer poet working in both verse and prose, Rae Gouirand is the author of nine titles of poetry and nonfiction, including Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018), The History of Art (The Atlas Review, 2019), The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024), a 2025 Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Whatever Dimness or Brightness (forthcoming 2026). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, Michigan Quarterly Review, [PANK], The Rumpus, Under a Warm Green Linden, ZYZZYVA, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, 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 serves as a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis. / raegouirand.com

Reviews

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dimensional: the near and the far at the same time. Paradoxical: abstract yet eerily present, as if watching through a window for snow to fall, protected from the cold yet imprisoned by the hard barrier of the pane from the experience of its absence yet impending arrival.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love poetry for the impressions a piece leaves you with. Open Winter by Rae Gouirand is full of impressions and immersions of the world in fleeting images and tones, giving readers a taste of her world vision in sharp articles of expression. Beautiful words.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

My seven favorite of this beautiful collection: Ask Both, In Wind: Blunt: Closer, Plurals, Glass Beach, Solstice, Night in Winter, and Infinitesimal.

[Mmbender · Rating 5 out of 5]

Open Winter is an amazing first book. Rae Gouirand's poems call our attention to the things we look at without seeing, and force us to acknowledge that seeing--whether we are looking at words on a page or a piece beach glass, tossed, and disappearing beneath the surface of the ocean--is an act that must be attended to as a conscious decision, even a deliberation

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complicated, layered creation, this collection will cause you to think of poetry in ways you had not considered before. Beautiful work.