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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
