Must Apple

by Rae Gouirand

Selected by T.C. Tolbert for the 2018 Oro Fino Chapbook Award

A love letter to second summer in California's Sacramento Valley, to time outside of time, and to the impossible fruits that come in waves after the known world has burned away. These poems plunge through grief, bounty, disbelief, and revelation over a longer now.

"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

Genres: Poetry

46 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2018

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]

Satisfying! Gouirand's poetry dives into the depths of living in a rural area, here the Sacramento Valley, and experiencing its bounty. One becomes intimate with the nature of a quince, persimmon, olive, or satsuma in ways that reveals something of how we process what we take in, what we are intimate with, what we are present to.

From the "Quince Suite":

Perhaps they know the mouth. Perhaps they lack our secrecy,
boast their own unsaid thing. What is there best so given?

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Of what use to Joan of Arc was that small wooden box
of rare confections usually presented to French royalty?

Shaped from the clear goo that results from boiling quince juice
and sugar, those little figures of flowers and animals

must have been a difficult gift marking the moment
she arrived in Orleans to liberate the French" (24).