Rae Gouriand’s long poemThe Velvet Book(Cornerstone Press, 2024) is a deeply visceral and textured exploration of grief, queer commitment, and desire. Gouriand’s work rejects stasis – both in terms of voice and form – through the speaker’s meditations on artistry, marriage, and the self, woven through the poem as velvet.
The Velvet Book begins with the words of the late poet Lucie Brock-Broido, whose death in 2018 was an impetus for the book. In addition to the epigraphs, there are direct addresses to Brock-Broido throughout, a testament to the ways in which our literary inspirations live within us, how “every line ever written /glows through what one person once wrote.” By calling Brock-Broido into the narrative, the speaker pays homage to her legacy and reflects on how the process of mourning might more clearly illuminate what remains. 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.”
Gouirand indeed approaches the world with a sharp, striking attention. “Everything left stands straight up,” electrified by the speaker’s disposition towards the richness and complexity of materials that move her. There is a constant moving-forward, reflected both in the long-form of the poem and the couplets that bleed into one another, line by line, allowing us to become fully immersed in her contemplations on velvet and self.
“I am trying to figure out what / beautiful things want–not / stillness, not immovability,” the speaker states early on, offering a desire to dissect the nuances of “beautiful things,” especially when viewed through the feminine. Gouriand writes: “girls are charged with seeing / and it’s catching up to me. Velvet catches / all it catches / a fresh ancient, a neon iciness, / a bruised birth, a pristine ruinousness / an untouched open book.” This complex rendering of imagery— “a bruised birth, a pristine ruinouness”—is a powerful rumination on the entanglements between destruction and renewal, love and death.
The fluidity of description is emblematic of how the speaker finds meaning in states of flux. This impulse—to resist “immovability”— becomes especially clear in her reflections on marriage. “I fell for women because I could read / and the more I read the less I hurried” the speaker states, which suggests a kind of openness rather than a narrowing-in. She takes time to parse through the intricacies of commitment, inviting us into the process. Her feelings on monogamy appear multifaceted and unable to be defined by a single descriptor: “I live inside the pool, I cannot exit / the pool, I am sleeved and legged / by the pool, shaded by the pool, hued / by it, I cannot escape the pool, / I have committed to it, I have married the pool.” One of the most compelling aspects of The Velvet Book is Gouriand’s lack of reduction. Though complicated, commitment is rendered not as an end but as a beginning: “What we commit / we live in as a room. Rooms open into one another.”
Imbued with lush language that mirrors the speaker’s meditations on velvet, The Velvet Book shows us how to “be intimate with all that we haunt.” It is gripping and contemplative, a reminder to pay close attention to the textures and relationships that transform us.
Kaija Holland recently received her MFA from Western Washington University, where she taught English composition and served as the Nonfiction Editor for Bellingham Review.
