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

Rae Gouirand’s first collection of poetry, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize, won an Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Audre Lorde Award for Poetry, and the California Book Award for Poetry.

Her chapbook Must Apple was selected by T.C. Tolbert for the Oro Fino Award and published by Educe Press in 2018. Her second collection, Glass is Glass Water is Water, is forthcoming from Spork Press in December.

Rae's work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, diode, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide, as well as in portfolios at A Dozen Nothing and The Inflectionist Review and the online archives of the Academy of American Poets and Verse Daily. An alumna of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, she has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Kalani, and the Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence programs and an award from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation for outstanding work by emerging poets. Since putting down western roots in 2003, she has founded several longrunning workshops in poetry and prose throughout California’s Sacramento Valley and online, served as Writer-in-Residence for the nation’s only conservancy-sponsored public arts program at Cache Creek Nature Preserve, and worked with the literary nonprofit Memoir Journal to develop a national platform for the (In)Visible Memoirs project, a grant-funded program facilitating writing workshops in underserved communities. In recent years she has served as guest editor for OCHO: A Journal of Queer Arts and a special issue of Adanna in tribute to Adrienne Rich, and as Nonfiction Editor for California Northern magazine.

She lectures in the Department of English at UC-Davis and is currently at work on a third collection of poems, a book-length poem, and a work of nonfiction.

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.