Contemporary Authors

• Mirror Mirror Rizzoli Electa (New York, NY), 2018

1. Ryan Mcginley : mirror mirror https://lccn.loc.gov/2018949438 Reines, Ariana. Ryan Mcginley : mirror mirror / Ariana Reines, Ryan McGinley ; [edited by] Isabel Venero. New York, NY : Rizzoli Electa, 2018. pages cm ISBN: 9780847863471 (hardcover : alk. paper) 2. The cow https://lccn.loc.gov/2006938244 Reines, Ariana The cow / Ariana Reines. 1st ed. New York : Fence Books, c2006. 107 p. ; 21 cm. PS3618.E56455 C69 2006 ISBN: 0977106470 (978-0-9771064-7-9) 3. Preliminary materials for a theory of the young-girl https://lccn.loc.gov/2011277800 Tiqqun (Collective) Premiers matériaux pour une théorie de la jeune fille. English. Preliminary materials for a theory of the young-girl / Tiqqun ; translated by Ariana Reines. Los Angeles, CA : Semiotext(e) ; Cambridge, Mass. : Distributed by MIT Press, c2012. 137 p. : ill. ; 18 cm. HQ1617 .T5713 2012 ISBN: 9781584351085158435108X 4. The little black book of Grisélidis Réal : days and nights of an anarchist whore https://lccn.loc.gov/2010275933 Hennig, Jean-Luc. Grisélidis, courtisane. English The little black book of Grisélidis Réal : days and nights of an anarchist whore / Jean-Luc Hennig ; translated by Ariana Reines. Los Angeles, CA : Semiotext(e) , c2009. 183 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. HQ230.A5 H46 2009 ISBN: 9781584350781 (pbk.)1584350784 (pbk.)

• Telephone - 2018 Wonder, https://smile.amazon.com/Telephone-Ariana-Reines/dp/0989598586/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1534117711&sr=8-2&keywords=Reines%2C+Ariana
• Coeur de Lion - 2011 Fence Books, https://smile.amazon.com/Coeur-Lion-Ariana-Reines/dp/1934200484/ref=sr_1_4_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534117711&sr=8-4&keywords=Reines%2C+Ariana
• Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism - 2013 Triple Canopy, https://smile.amazon.com/Corrected-Slogans-Reading-Writing-Conceptualism/dp/0984734627/ref=sr_1_6_twi_pap_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1534117802&sr=1-6
• Yana Toyber: This Time - 2015 Damiani, https://smile.amazon.com/Yana-Toyber-This-Ariana-Reines/dp/8862083963/ref=sr_1_9_twi_har_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1534117802&sr=1-9
• Oscar Tuazon: Die - 2012 The Power Station , https://smile.amazon.com/Oscar-Tuazon-Die-Kim-West/dp/0984023003/ref=sr_1_11_twi_pap_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1534117802&sr=1-11
• Mercury - 2011 Fence Books, https://smile.amazon.com/Mercury-Ariana-Reines/dp/1934200476/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534117711&sr=8-1&keywords=Reines%2C+Ariana

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariana_Reines

  Ariana Reines
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  Ariana Reines is an American poet, playwright, performance artist, and translator. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); Mercury (2011); and Thursday (2012).[1] She has taught at UC Berkeley (Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry, 2009), Columbia University (2013), The New School (2013), and Tufts University (2014).[1][2][3][4][5] Reines has been described by Michael Silberblatt of NPR's Bookworm as "one of the crucial voices of her generation." [1]

  Her play Telephone was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre,[6] and presented at The Cherry Lane Theatre in February 2009,[7] with two Obie wins.[3][8][9] She participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial as a member of Semiotext(e).[10] Her performance collaboration with Jim Fletcher, Mortal Kombat, was presented at Le Mouvement in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, in August 2014,[11] and was again presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October 2014.[12]
  Contents

  1 Biography
  2 Works
  3 Teaching
  4 Bibliography
  4.1 Books of Poetry
  4.2 Plays
  4.3 Performance
  4.4 Anthologies
  4.5 Translations
  4.6 Catalogues and Contributions
  5 Awards
  6 References
  7 External links

  Biography

  Reines was born in Salem, Massachusetts. She said that the Salem Witch Trials were relevant in her writing, saying "I am sure that Salem's history has influenced me in every way. I know that there still lurks in me the fear that if I speak the truth as I know it, I will be locked up in a mental institution and then killed in public while a mockery of me is made."[13] She graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, and completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy.[1][14][15] In 2010, she served as a translator on a UN Mission to Haiti.[16]
  Works

  The Cow The Cow (Fence Books, 2006) addresses themes of abjection, filth, and disgust. It is framed by several excerpted texts, including a guide to bovine carcass disposal, as well as the Bible, and works by Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, and Marguerite Duras, a structure which Reines has described as "passing all of literature through a hamburger helper." [17] Of the titular figure, Reines has claimed that "the cow is a real modernist figure. I feel like after God died, the cow became the onlooker in great works of modernism...it’s like the residue of the divine in the twentieth century." [18] Reines' writing style in The Cow has been described as one that "appropriates and shreds other texts, but which sometimes hides the theft; a search for beauty under piles of carcasses both metaphorical and real"; the same review pointed out that "in the context of such fraught, relentless hammering, such brief moments of beauty can risk seeming like desperately mimed cliches."[19]

  Coeur de Lion Coeur de Lion (Mal-o-Mar, 2007; reissued by Fence Books, 2011) is a book-length poem addressed to an elusive, fractured, "you," who Reines has stated constitutes "the 'you' of YouTube and advertising...what the impoverished 'I' is made of." [18] It depicts the unravelling of a love affair between the narrator and this addressee. The title is a twin reference to King Richard the Lionheart, as well as the brand of camembert.[15]

  Telephone Telephone was performed at the Cherry Lane Theater in February 2009. It is based on The Telephone Book: Technology — Schizophrenia — Electric Speech by philosopher Avital Ronell, and has been described as an "inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play" and "not for everyone".[20] Telephone consists of three sections: one recreates the first ever phone call, between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson; the second is centered around Ms. St., a patient of Carl Jung who believed she had a telephone inside of her; the third brings the three characters together.[20] The play won two Obie Awards, one for Birgit Huppuch's performance as Ms. St., and another for Ken Rus Schmoll as director.[21] The second act of Telephone was expanded into a short piece entitled Miss St.'s Hieroglyphic Suffering, and was presented as part of The Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series in November 2009, again starring Birgit Huppuch.

  Mercury Mercury (Fence Books, 2011) consists of several intermeshed long poems. Its five sections each begin with alchemical symbols, which, according to B.K. Fisher, writing for the Boston Review, places the reader "in a realm where the transmutation of materials is an analogy for personal purification and esoteric or spiritual quest." [22] Reines has stated that Mercury is "a ground, a field, a structure in which the poems can resonate together as much more than merely themselves." [23]
  Teaching

  Reines has taught at Tufts University, Columbia University, The New School, and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.[1][2][3][4][5] In 2009, she was the youngest ever Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at University of California at Berkeley.[15] In addition, Reines has taught workshops in many non-institutional settings, such as Poets House [24] and the Poetry Project.[25] In the fall of 2012, and again in 2013, she led a workshop called Ancient Evenings, which facilitated a communion around ancient texts.[26]

  In 2012, Reines led a vision quest in New Mexico.[27]
  Bibliography
  Books of Poetry

  The Cow (Fence Books, 2006)
  Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar, 2007; reissued by Fence, 2011)
  Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)
  Thursday (Spork, 2012)
  Beyond Relief (with Celina Su, Belladonna*, 2013)
  The Origin Of The World (Semiotext(e), 2014)
  Ramayana (The Song Cave, 2015)
  Tiffany's Poems (The Song Cave, 2015)

  Plays

  Telephone (2009)
  Miss St.’s Hieroglyphic Suffering (2009)
  Lorna (with Jim Fletcher,[28] 2013)

  Performance

  The Poetry Brothel (The Poetry Society of New York, 2008)
  The Origin of the World (2014)
  Mortal Kombat (with Jim Fletcher,[28] 2014)

  Anthologies

  Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010)
  Against Expression (Northwestern University Press, 2011)
  Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Materials (Triple Canopy/MoMA, 2011)
  Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism (Triple Canopy, 2013)

  Translations

  The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-luc Henning (Semiotext(e), 2009)
  My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire (Mal-O-Mar, 2009)
  Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun (Semiotext(e), 2012)

  Catalogues and Contributions

  Animal Shelter 1 (Animal Shelter, 2008)
  "The Air We Breathe" (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2011)
  Oscar Tuazon: Die (The Power Station, 2012)
  Parkett no. 91 (Parkett Verlag, 2012)
  Better Homes (SculptureCenter, 2013)
  Introduction to Cunt Norton by Dodie Bellamy (Les Figues Press, 2013)
  Yana Toyber: This Time (Damiani, 2015)
  The Passion According to Carol Rama (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2015)

  Awards

  Phi Beta Kappa Society, Barnard College, 2002 [29]
  Winner of the Alberta Prize for "The Cow", 2006 [1]
  Judge of the National Poetry Series, 2013 [30]
  Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, 2014 [31]

• Lazy Eye Haver - http://lazyeyehaver.com/

  About

  LAZY EYE HAVER is an astrology project in Manhattan, NYC & on the Internet, led by Ariana Reines.

  Ariana is a poet, playwright, performing artist, & astrologer.

  Books: The Cow (Alberta Prize), Coeur de Lion, Mercury, The Origin of the World, Thursday, Tiffany’s Poems, Ramayana A Sand Book (forthcoming), she judged the 2013 National Poetry Series, &c.

  Performances: Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R, Guggenheim Museum, The Hammer, The Swiss Institute, Renaissance Society, &c.

  Teaching: UC Berkeley, Columbia, The New School, Tufts, Poets House, The Poetry Project, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, & the Fine Arts Work Center, 2 seasons of ANCIENT EVENINGS, &c.

  Prose & Interviews: Artforum, Robert Gober, K8 Hardy, Francesca Woodman, Jason Lazarus, Ben Lerner, Michelle Tea, &c.

  Translations: Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by TIQQUN, The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real by Jean-Luc Hennig, & My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, &c.

  Education: school of hard knox, BA in French & English from Barnard College (Summa Cum Laude, 2003) & MA in Media & Communication from European Graduate School (2006), PhD studies in French and Romance Philology at Columbia University (2004-2006, dropped out). Astrology studies with Adam Elenbaas, Filip Marinovic, & Michel André.

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ariana-reines

  Ariana Reines
  http://arianareines.tumblr.com/

  Ariana Reines
  Born in Salem, Massachusetts, poet, playwright, and translator Ariana Reines earned a BA from Barnard College, and completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); and Mercury (2011). Her poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (2011) and Gurlesque (2010). Known for her interest in bodily experience, the occult, new media, and the possibilities of the long or book-length form, Reines has been described as “one of the crucial voices of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt on NPR’s Bookworm. At once personal, Romantic, slippery, and extreme, Reines’s poetry investigates and overturns lyric conventions. Of her own work, she admitted in an interview with HTML Giant: “My best writing seems to have to be forced from me by some other force but that force has to be one whose power I agree to serve.”

  Reines’s first play Telephone (2009) was performed at the Cherry Lane Theater and received two Obie Awards. A re-imagining of its second act was featured as part of the Guggenheim’s Works+Process series in 2009, and the script was published in Play: A Journal of Plays in 2010. Reines’s translations include a version of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore(2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young-Girl (2012).

  Reines has taught at Columbia University and the European Graduate School, and was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley in 2009, the youngest poet to ever hold that position. She has traveled to Haiti multiple times as part of the on-going relief efforts there.
  Poems by Ariana Reines

  The Four Seasons
  [Love]
  Science Fiction
  See All Poems by Ariana Reines

  More About this Poet

  Region:

• Boston Review - http://bostonreview.net/author/ariana-reines

  About This Author
  Ariana Reines

  Ariana Reines’s books of poetry include The Cow (2006), Coeur de Lion (2007) and most recently Mercury (2011). Her first play, Telephone (2009) was performed at the Cherry Lane Theater and received two Obie Awards. Her translations include a version of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2009), Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (2009), and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young-Girl (2012).

Telephone
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p70+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Telephone
Ariana Reines. Wonder, $14.95 trade paper (122p) ISBN 978-0-9895985-8-3
Performance artist, translator, and literary alchemist Reines (Mercury) puts to the page her maniacally absurdist Obie Award-winning dramatic work about how communication evolves with technology. Inspired by Avital Ronell's multidisciplinary investigation of the telephone and the work of Carl Jung, Thomas Watson, and Alexander Graham Bell, Reines's play explores the inevitable limits of communication through metaphysical repartee, oracular delusion, and speech catatonia. The first act features a dialogue of genteel angst concerning the fallibility of expression. As Watson says to Bell, "perhaps some of what one says makes sense and perhaps it makes so much sense that the other one cannot bear it." Reines's second act follows an emotionally tumultuous schizophrenic convinced that she has a telephone in her body, resulting in a maelstrom of prescient insights and nonsensical proclamations: "I AM THE BELL THE NOTE-FACTORY THE MONOPOLY." The closing act, "The Lovers," moves through a series of turbulent, tedious, or semantically oblique exchanges ("what do you want me to say") between two individuals struggling to simultaneously achieve authenticity and harmony. The work may initially appear daunting to readers unaccustomed to absurdism, but it offers much to both poetic and dramaturgical readings. Poignant and hilarious, Reines's work is emotionally resonant and an exemplary model of experimental writing. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Telephone." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 70+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532700/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=54be6fcf. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
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Poetry as alchemy
Marietta Abrams
The Brooklyn Rail.
(Jan. 2013): p62. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc. http://www.brooklynrail.org
Full Text:
Ariana Reines, Mercury (Fence, 2011)
Ariana Reines casts a powerful spell with her sublimely hardcore poems in Mercury. It's the Brooklyn writer's third book after The Cow (2006), Coeur de Lion (2007), and her Obie Award- winning play, The Telephone (2009). In this new collection of long, connected poems, Reines works her own stunning brand of semantic alchemy to "pass through" the grimy screen of culture and language for a glimpse into the core/ore, the "luster of this world" that elevates and unifies us all. Like alchemists who believe that lead is just another form of gold, Reines sees the essential light that can be hidden in all aspects of life, however sad and ugly: encounters with skeevy pervs on the L train, damaged, neglectful parents, schizophrenic siblings, ambition, abusive lovers, Internet porn.
Reines's goal to connect her readers with unalloyed beauty is laid out in the book's title: Mercury is the Greek messenger to the gods, the magician. In alchemy, it's the transmuting metal that transcends earth and heaven, life and death. The opening poems invoke the transportive powers of alchemy's masters--Hermes, Artemis, Rozenkreutz, Nicholas Flamel. Alchemical symbols illustrate short spell-poems like "EMAIL/SORROW/MOON" and "FUMES/POWDER/ ESSENCE," which are crisp and evocative counterpoints to longer pieces that come at the truth from crazily varied directions with language that's sometimes lyrical, sometimes trashy and plainspoken.
In the laugh out loud "Truth or Consequences," the commandments for truth and art are revealed in a vision of beef jerky. In contrast, the devastating poem "When I Looked at Your Cock My Imagination Died" is an e-mail from an anonymous person outlining the shots for an Internet porn movie. Reines's inventive, anti-poetic language brings us uncomfortably close to the strangled soul of the pornographer.
The poems that follow beg the question: At the root, aren't we all whores to our desire, whether it's for sex, fame, or even the truth? Reines struggles with this concept in "Rainer Werner Fassbinder" where she's caught between her ambition to make pure art "a sacrifice melted down/To become the very ore of beauty that makes worlds" and desire for critical acclaim by a culture that's corruptive.
Perhaps Reines's wise poem "Save the World" elucidates the poet's artistic vision best; in it, she
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writes: "It is only through this mesh of faults/That I see." Abrams, Marietta
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Abrams, Marietta. "Poetry as alchemy." The Brooklyn Rail, Jan. 2013, p. 62. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353645416/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8b19da34. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A353645416
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Fuck those assholes the love poetry of
Ariana Reines
Brian Kalkbrenner
The Fader.
.55 (July-August 2008): p42. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 The Fader
http://www.thefader.com
Full Text:
Though she would have had no trouble finding a publisher (her first book of poetry, The Cow, was an award-winner published on a reputable press), twenty-seven-year-old Ariana Reines chose to release Coeur de Lion on the imprint she recently co-founded, mal-o-mar editions. "I didn't want to have to wait a long time for it to come out, I wanted to be able to move on," she says. Moreover, mal-o-mar (the name is a pun on the marshmallow treat and on Mallarme, the 19th century French poet whose spatially experimental work, Reines explains, is "full of white foam; the marshmallow is his food," and whose dandyism Reines finds politically subversive) gives her the freedom to follow her instincts in pursuing projects other than her own writing (a translation of Baudelaire is in the works).
Unlike many recent books of poetry, which seek to assimilate both pop and academic cultures, Coeur de Lion does so without any ironic posturing or condescension; the book's treatment of its subjects is sincere. Equal consideration is given to the likes of Mel Gibson and Georges Bataille, Nabokov and Stevie Wonder, Leonard Cohen, Madame Bovary, "that brat Arthur Rimbaud" and Sade. Reines says she envisions Coeur de Lion as "the intersection of two extremes--an extreme of sincerity and an extreme of artifice." That intersection gives rise to the paradox of the book as an object, a "concerted effort," which takes as its subject something spontaneous, immediate and transient--namely, the experience of being in love:
"Fuck those assholes/ who think that there is nothing/ To know about love./ I'm nauseous/ Cos of the possibility of us attacking Iran/ And the hot rain falling right now./ Manhattan is full of white women with/ Businesslike bodies. It's all/ Handheld devices. If I can't make this feeling right now/ For you more personal/ The general consensus is going to/ Fucking kill me. Recall manual/ Figurations. Recall metaphors/ Of hands. Recall your hands./ My total impotence/ As an individual. My failure/ At freedom/ Of speech./ I'm already/ Forgetting your face/ So maybe I was playing/ Myself more than I thought/ About having more feelings than/ Most assholes."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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BRIAN KALKBRENNER mal-o-mar.blogspot.com Kalkbrenner, Brian
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kalkbrenner, Brian. "Fuck those assholes the love poetry of Ariana Reines." The Fader, July-
Aug. 2008, p. 42. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A183137023 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1ce3b90a. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A183137023
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A Review of Coeur de Lion by Ariana
Reines
Erica Anzalone
Interim.
29.3 (Annual 2012): p165+. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Anzalone, Erica. "A Review of Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines." Interim, vol. 29, no. 3, 2012, p.
165+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A322025749 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b292754b. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A322025749
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"Telephone." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 70+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532700/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=54be6fcf. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Abrams, Marietta. "Poetry as alchemy." The Brooklyn Rail, Jan. 2013, p. 62. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353645416/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8b19da34. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Kalkbrenner, Brian. "Fuck those assholes the love poetry of Ariana Reines." The Fader, July-Aug. 2008, p. 42. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A183137023/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1ce3b90a. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018. Anzalone, Erica. "A Review of Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines." Interim, vol. 29, no. 3, 2012, p. 165+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A322025749/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b292754b. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.

• Boston Review
  http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR37.4/b_k_fischer_ariana_reines_coeur_de_lion_mercury_poetry.php
  Word count: 2259

  Amen
  Ariana Reines’s Erotic Soul B.K. Fischer

  Ariana Reines,
  Cœur de Lion
  Fence Books, $15.95 (paper)
  Mercury
  Fence Books, $16.95 (paper)

  Marcus J. Ranum

  The erotic sublime is a species of paradox in English-language poetry. Trafficking in the sublime usually entails a renunciation of the body, a giving-over of style, beauty, and politics, to the ineffable at the expense of the real—all of which coexist uneasily with the demands of human contact associated with the erotic.

  And yet Ariana Reines, perhaps the most sexually explicit poet writing today, flirts with sublimity, transcendent desire, and mysticism. Aggressively charismatic, her poems exceed the terms that describe them—obscene, scatological, idiosyncratic, despondent, graphic, synthetic—and strain toward ecstatic states with an elusive but fervent will to believe.

  Not that she is a spiritual poet. Her poems contain no trace of religiosity or theological hope, and she mentions sacred agendas with comic deflation (“I would be a Catholic in New Jersey if I could”). Glib and garrulous, she traverses hyper-charged realms where contemporary verse culture crosses with Internet pornography, medieval literature, performance art, popular media, and cultural theory, yet beneath all the mess is an intense striving that is hard to pin down, the yearning of a solitary soul in extremis. An unlikely and sex-obsessed prophet, Reines augurs a new direction in contemporary poetry—a disturbing, contradictory offbeat breach of cool that verges on the uncanny.

  • • •

  The paradoxical project of the erotic sublime is not new. Many poets have adapted and refracted stances that entwine sex and spirit, from Sufi mystics to the Metaphysicals to Blake. Think of Keats’s lavish yearnings to unite soul and eros, or Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ability to convey sensuality-in-prayer to the point of combustion (albeit repressed to the nth degree), or Elizabeth Bishop’s oceanic knowledge, “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world.” Recently, within and against this Romantic strain, we’ve heard from Mark Doty, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Susan Mitchell, Carl Phillips, and Michael Waters. In her class “Prayer, Despair, and Ecstasy,” Reines teaches “Celan, Césaire, Cohen, Conrad, Donne, Plath, Rankine, Rimbaud and others, plus hymns, sutras, curses, and magic spells from Ancient Greece, contemporary Salem, Haiti, and Appalachia.” She takes her place alongside these diverse influences, but with a uniquely contemporary edge.

  Reines’s two recent books, Cœur de Lion and Mercury, continue the systematic deconstruction of the dichotomy between sacred and profane that she began in The Cow (2006). Her work epitomizes what Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg have termed the “Gurlesque,” a radicalized poetics of feminist rupture that employs sexual effrontery as a means of exposing the limits of gendered conventions. Reines is the Gurlesque’s most explicit poet and also its keenest intellect—the raunchy surface of her work belies its cognitive difficulty, the strenuous demands it places on the reader to synthesize its imagistic sensuality, semantic riffing, and capacious range of reference. In Mercury, Reines reflects on her process: “I began to write in an ugly way / To subtract myself from womanhood and see only / A person in bas-relief with crucial parts and cartoon / Grief. ”

  Her investigations of subjectivity and aestheticization are steeped in highbrow theory, and her methods are consciously self-reflexive, but she returns again and again to the fundamental sources of human grief. “I am interested in how suffering’s housed and passed down through crotches,” she explains in an interview. Pathos has its root in suffering, as does passion, and Reines edges us toward the horror and frenzy of Passion with a capital P. Cœur de Lion reprints Reines’ self-published 2007 epistolary poem about the end of a love affair. Documenting consummation and break-up, it explores the “. . . many / Kinds of transmission / Between people. / Stronger things than sentences. / Liquids, exhaled / Words on top of them. / Where is the ‘you’ of You / Tube.” (That move, from declarative libidinal performance to wry comment on modern media, is signature Reines.)

  Despite the stigma associated with the term, this is neo-confessionalism with theoretical chops. Not since Sylvia Plath has a poet indulged an orgy of self-speculation of these proportions. The bloody entrails of The Cow gave new meaning to spilling your guts, and now Cœur de Lion rambles through the psychological realism of too much information, “as though / Your desire really were as limitless / And general as the fucking internet.”

  Pondering the affair in retrospect, the speaker’s moping takes a maudlin but meditative turn: “I was listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard / Cohen in order to think about / You for literary purposes.” The reference is funny, but it comes in the midst of a moment of terrifying vacuity of emotion, the speaker’s sense that feeling too much and nothing have become equated. She fears a collapse of her humanity, as if “My heart’s been botoxed; we’re / All fucked.” Steven Lance, blogging for Small Press Traffic, reports that Reines saved a “scary surprise” for her audience at the end of a 2010 reading. She sang a skillful rendition of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” that “undid a generation of media exploitation and cheapening.” (According to the Boston Globe, “Hallelujah” is “the most trafficked tune of the soundtrack era.”) Mercury includes a long critique of the 2009 film Watchmen, which Reines claims “assassinates” Cohen’s song by using it in a scene of superhero sex. Treading close to reaction formation, Reines pulls back from her protest:

  But Hallelujah, lounge-era Leonard Cohen
  Already performs a distance from
  Even a kind of irony against
  itself, enclosing as it does a Biblical grandeur within cheap atmosphere
  Basically the song’s a lesson
  That under any vile sheen a soul or truth can move.

  “Hallelujah” occupies a place between orgasmic exclamation and the Praise Yah of ancient scripture, the utterance of the seeker and the King of Pop. Reines often subjects religious forms to both praise and parody in this way: “I told you about the red / Stone of the Strasbourg Cathedral / And that I feel a heat from Gothic / Buildings that feels so human, like / Geometry and plants fucked each / Other and went insane.” This is droll, but oddly apropos. It is part and parcel of the speaker’s heartbreaking desire for profound connection, undifferentiated contact, and truth:

  how rare, to undertake an act
  That’s truly free, and not just a response
  To a confused surge of drives and fears.

  Fast forward to the end of Mercury, where the words “Amen Amen Amen” sit alone on a page, right after another page with only the phrase “World without end.” Do we read these isolated final words of the Trinitarian doxology as prayer or joke or both? Mercury comprises five sections headed with alchemical symbols, positioning the reader immediately in a realm where the transmutation of materials is an analogy for personal purification and esoteric or spiritual quest. The jacket copy announces a preoccupation with substance and essence, body and soul, and the book’s reflective silver cover stages a Whitmanian communion of reader and writer (hello, listener up there)—a mirror of the speaker’s effort to transmogrify through a process of self-scrutiny. The book’s namesake, the hermaphroditic Mercury, is a relentlessly binary figure of unified opposites. In the penultimate section, also titled “Mercury,” the language breaks down into arrays that exploit the possibilities of admixture: “FUMES / POWDER / ESSENCE / TAMPON.” We laugh at this insertion (sorry) of the Gurlesque, but the singularity of “tampon” acts as a sizzling catalyst in the crucible—we are back in the body and of it—purified enough to receive the book’s final section, titled “0,” which returns to the zero hour of nativity, maternity, and a legacy of familial pain.

  Not since Sylvia Plath has a poet indulged an orgy of self-speculation of such proportions.

  Before we get to zero, however, we pass through 150 pages of video porn and prayer interlaced with everything else. “The Perforator God” meanders through the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the search for a sigil in an artwork, the word “mysteriouser,” and the sentence “I will be born again” (followed, after a line-break, by “As a bumble bee, dried up and dead”). It mourns the absence of the windhover, Hopkins’s famous figure for Christ. (“Selfsame,” another quintessential Hopkins word, is nearby.) All of this follows a post-coital scene that is peculiar, for Reines, in its grace:

  A silver corsair
  In a violet distance
  That I am capable of imagining
  Inside a world
  In which the cashew-colored sky
  Emits a musk
  Of snow
  Is the zone in which
  I will lay down what’s most harassed in me
  And make it die.

  The poem gestures “heavenward,” where clouds “people the vault / With their comforting velleities,” but Reines quickly undercuts the dim wishes of this network of spiritual valences. In the next poem, “Truth or Consequences,” a female Virgil accompanies the speaker-pilgrim to a mock-ceremonial ablution, or only a swim. A remix of Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island,” the poem dramatizes a full-on, conversion-worthy vision of the world as beef jerky: “Then / All of a sudden // I saw jerky // A curtain / Of jerky spread / Over the world.” The speaker is called by a higher power, and after talking to the sun, declares, “My secular life / If I ever had one is over.” Reines is not serious, but she’s not not serious either. She experiments with the terms and syntax of rapture.

  In the remarkable list poem “Baraka,” which is set in all caps (“shouted”), Reines assembles a sequence of impassioned non-sequiturs. Among bodily longings (“I CAN’T WAIT FOR A THICKER COCK”), she includes this block of re-appropriated religious imagery, the heftiest section of the poem,

  I CAN’T WAIT TO STEAL THE SMOKING CENSERS, THE MITRE, THE STAFF, THE ALTAR, THE CHRYSANTHEMUM NECKLACE, THE WHITE STRING, THE VEIL, THE SEVEN VEILS, THE HOLY WATER, THE BLACK ROCK, THE WHITE WALL, THE METAL FENCE, THE COILING RAZORWIRE ATOP THE METAL FENCE, I CAN’T WAIT TO STEAL THE BAD UNDERSHORTS, THE SHIRTSLEEVES, THE CASSOCKS, THE MAGIC APRONS, THE CAKES BAKED WITH URINE, THE PINK ROSEWATERS, THE FLORIDA WATERS, THE SMOKE AND MIRRORS, THE ALABASTER JARS, THE TUSKS, THE KILTS, THE FINE MASONIC SWORDS, I CAN’T WAIT TO STEAL THE ARC AND THE WOOD THAT WAS BENT TO MAKE IT WITH, THE ILLEGIBLE SCROLL, THE WAINSCOT BY THE FOOT OF THE ANGELIC YOUNG RABBI, THE STOCKINGED FOOT IN ITS OPEN-TOED SANDAL, THE HEAVY STONE TABLE, THE SILENCE IN THE PLACES, THE SMALL CLAY URN WITH A BOOK STUFFED IN IT

  Amen, it is true, so be it—stolen, swerving, and clutched. Reines forces language into tantrums of accumulation that build—“the veil,” “the illegible,” “the silence”—to the threshold of the sublime. In Kant’s formulation, sublimity is not a metaphor for our relation to the ineffable, but rather the metaphor the mind falls back on in desperation and failure after grasping for the ineffable. That sublime-of-second-remove is the sublime of post-Romantic modernity, and Reines thinks herself right up to this brink.

  Transcendent or not, Reines’s poetry succeeds because it manifests two old-school virtues. It zooms in on specific, juicy details, and it employs vivid diction with relish and aplomb. She makes us see the world anew, with fresh awareness, whether looking self-ward at the body (“my eraser tits”) or outward at the world (a homeless man who “Wraps his dressings in Duane Reade bags / When it rains”). Her poems get under the skin because they are tactile and attentive, heedful of the particular stopping-places of the mind: “the global / Warming kept me in summer / Love with you like I was under a / Fermata.” She trawls the collective consciousness for terms that pop, phrases that seduce: “Abundance / And parsimony / Are the wicked parsley / In my frizzy hair.” We can trust her flights of rapture because we can trust her wordsmithery: “a serrated eustechon,” “wheat and chaff, lentils and ash.” As one poem’s title reminds, she knows how to work with polysemy: “I Decline,” says the speaker who refuses and demurs, who lapses into weakness, who gives inflection to the things and modifiers.

  Reines is a tricky and unsettling poet to appraise—she lays traps everywhere, smiles behind them. Her erotic mysticism is a trap, but she falls into it herself. She writes like her soul depends on it, like a Sor Juana of the sound byte, or like a Saint Teresa of the net stream. But only like. This caveat, this trying on and testing out of transcendence, is inbuilt in Mercury’s eponymous image: “Saying like is attaching one thing to another in this atmosphere that offers no resistance. Or the word wants to be the drop of mercury in the silver dollar sized plastic labyrinth.” That silvery bead is not really mercury, of course, not in any party-favor plastic labyrinth I’ve ever seen—it is plastic too. It moves like mercury, fired by the mind, and its power as poison or elixir relies on a preposterous faith in the transformative power of the word.

• Luna Luna
  http://www.lunalunamagazine.com/blog/review-of-a
  Word count: 1200

  Review of Ariana Reines' 'Mercury'
  March 9, 2016

  BY LIZ AXELROD

  Editor's Note: This appeared on our old site.

  Ariana Reines, the Goddess of putting it all out there is a supercharged, magical she-wolf. The sweet beast’s soft underbelly and sharp black claws reside happily in her poetry. She brings to light the twists and churns of our page-surfing information obsessed sex-craved whims and deepest most petrifying wishes.

  A couple of years ago I picked up her book Coeur De Lion and became as obsessed with her poems as I once was with Thom Yorke and Johnny Depp. Yes. I suffer from a very large dose of fan-love-word-lust and worship. That said my review of Mercury is going to be just a tiny bit biased.

  In full disclosure, after I read Ariana, I made it my business to bring her to the New School where I was studying for my MFA. I contacted her and asked if she would be kind enough to come to my class with Catherine Barnett and speak about her revision process. She said yes! Much to my amazement and yes, my ass-backwards approach did get me in a little hot water with Professor Barnett as she would have liked me to ask her first. But I never sit on circumstance, and well, I just had to bring Ariana’s poetic light to my classmates.

  And did she bring it!

  We spent the better part of an hour discussing how she approached Mercury, how the poems became pieces on the page, how she worked with her editor, the wonderful Rebecca Wolfe of Fence, and how the symbols she picked wove into the words. She told us about choosing the baby pics that are scattered in the last part of the book and how growth has been a major theme of hers. All the while my fellow poets (Ian Brown especially) stood wide-mouthed gaping at her beauty (and her very sheer green top).

  The wonder of Ariana Reines’ feminine mystique is unmatched by the vivacity of language and intelligence she possesses. After that class on revision, in my position as weekend workshop coordinator for the Writing Program, I talked Jackson Taylor and Lori Lynn Turner into having her do a Saturday workshop. She proposed a four part series called The Wolf & The Dog.

  We spoke of Romulus and Remus and the creation and fall of Rome, looked at the Tarot, discussed Bukowski and Eileen Miles, and found ways to work with both liberation and restraint. I wrote two poems in that workshop that have since been published. Blessed Be. Ariana.

  So yes, this review is biased. She’s worth it.

  Mercury is damn beautiful. Its mica-mirror cover with a slim black title catches light and reflects all in its path. Mercury is the smallest planet and the closest to the sun. Mercury, the chemical, is highly toxic, commonly known as Quicksilver and is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. Mercury in its book form is filled with shimmering poetry that tastes like cotton candy mixed with cum and works as an antidote to the poison of withholding.

  The sheer volume of the book is daunting. Its 236 pages of vibrant feminism; sex and toys, boys and girls, thick cocks and wet pussys, atmospheric floating, wanting, and worshiping, are arranged in three volatile sections that leave you breathless, hot, panting and satiated (all at the same time):

  Medium

  This is for you visible angel
  Giving me what I need
  In the only way I can get it

  I don’t know what I need
  Until you have given it to me
  To make me know I needed it

  O stone of all that I am not. O gem of all things
  Making me lick your gorgon eye
  & touch myself eternally

  As I read this collection for the second time, I saw it for its simplicity and its depth. This is one of the main things that attracted me to Ariana Reines. She has a way of taking a few words, putting them in a line and opening your mind to the universe of possibilities. Her use of simple and direct language brings you right into the poem and yet leaves you in the margins, wondering where it came from and then not giving a fuck, just happy it’s there, finally, on the page:

  From the Perforator God

  On a newly renovated Victorian House
  The contractors will sweep me up
  With the other dried up bees
  I guess everything that sucks dries
  up, or something like that
  I can insert myself into something more
  Invisible, something smaller
  The jealous, rich minds of poets
  Lonelier and more confused than ever
  And even more eager
  To justify and verify
  Their existences

  Ariana uses mostly free form with many pages given to only white space and three to five words. But her craft is evident. Her use of enjambments and her savvy language craft works to bring the reader into the poem and the poems linger on even when it is seemingly but a thought:

  Your music makes me feel lonely

  And then the next page:

  Your music makes
  me feel lonely

  The next:

  Picking a lemon
  late at night
  my heart tightens

  The next:

  I fear nature

  And then:

  Your music makes me feel lonely
  I must be responsible for it
  I’m alive

  Throughout this gorgeous compelling text are images and symbols, pictures, letters, inner thought processes and self flagellation. When you finish reading you are left with a sense of completion. The life reflected on the pages starts with present sexual tense and tension, moves through seeking searching and reflection and then finishes with a spurt of childhood, birth, and familial regret. It’s a wonder and it shines. O it SHINES.

  This one was born with one eye facing inward

  Like this work? Donate to Liz Axelrod.

  Liz Axelrod received her MFA from the New School in 2013. She writes poems, book reviews, essays, fiction and anything her pointed pen finger deems relevant. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Publisher’s Weekly, The Brooklyn Rail, Electric Literature, Counterpunch, Nap Magazine, Yes Poetry, The Ampersand Review, and more. Her Chapbook "Go Ask Alice" was chosen as a finalist in the 2015 Finishing Line Press New Woman's Voices Competition and will be published in March, 2016. She is an Adjunct Professor at SUNY Westchester Community College, a book reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, staff writer for Luna Luna Magazine, and co-host and curator of the Cedermere Reading Series in the home of William Cullen Bryant. Find her here: www.yourmoonsmine.com
  In Poetry & Prose Tags books, ariana reines

• Mary A Journal of New Writing
  https://maryajournalofnewwriting.wordpress.com/reviews-and-interviews/reviews/casey-mcalduff-reviews-ariana-reines-mercury/
  Word count: 1615

  MARY: A Journal of New Writing

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  Casey McAlduff Reviews Ariana Reines’ “Mercury”

  Mercury
  by Ariana Reines
  Fence Books, 2011

  Ariana Reines’ poetry puts the heart where the mouth is. By moving the beating organ to the place where the rest of us have been told to put our money, Reines reminds us that the taste of currency is akin to the taste of blood. And Mercury, with its silver, reflective cover, is determined to maintain this electric-bodily connection: between the profit and the laborer, the consumer and the soul, the reader and the poem, and the writer and the word/world.

  The book, broken into five contexts, which can be read autonomously or in series, is a tribute to alchemy and the universal solvent, to the metaphorical transmutation of the person into enlightened being (gold) and the literal belief that the transmutation of a substance into gold could be the cure to all diseases. Though that she is often regarded (and sometimes disregarded) by critics as an author of the “gurlesque” genre, Ariana’s work in Mercury reveals the spiritual, political, and most importantly, the experimental underpinnings of her craft. That she manages this reveal while still titling the third of the five books, “When I Looked At Your Cock My Imagination Died,” is a feat few writers could pull off, not to mention that she is able to do it humorously: “All my tears are dry/ I look at a Glenn Beck book/ I look at the adipose sky/ I forget how to write poetry” (“Gold” 127).

  When read for its alchemical core, Mercury is engaged in an exploration of property, both public and private, as the book beautifully manipulates this common politic into an extended metaphor of substance and essence. And it is precisely the distinction between these terms that provides a point of access into the book. The essence is occult, the substance its distinct containment; in other words, the essence is “hidden by wrappings of specific properties which prevent the ordinary man from recognizing it.”[1] This belief can also be considered through Plato: the object that is seen (the substance) mimics the universal Form, becoming just a shadow of its essence rather than the real thing, which cannot be perceived directly. It is Ariana’s task in Mercury to disclose these wrappings in order to draw out the soul from the body’s distinguishing qualities.

  Like copper transmuted into gold via chemical process, Reines’ verse uses the act of writing to expose the essential spirit and to demonstrate that our likeness is found in Stevens’ dump, in The Wasteland’s ‘heap of broken images’, just as it is found in God. In this way, Mercury is reminiscent of The Cow, the author’s debut that led to her cult-like poetic fandom. The Cow, a book-length poem investigating the meat industry’s effects on the psyche and on the bodies of man and animal, has on its cover a photograph of a stack of cow carcasses. Out of this pile of death and disease, Ariana filters the desperate voice of the “I” as it tries to make sense of the horrors it’s wading through.

  This notion of the “I” as consequent feeling, of the “I” as oppressed and therefore taking opportunity to speak, of the “I” as a reaction of the spirit to a specific atmosphere, is also the driving theme of the author’s recently re-published Couer de Lion (Fence Books, 2011). Couer de Lion differs from Mercury in its scope; it is a book-length series of untitled poems unabashedly directed at an ex, and reads more like a summertime bestseller in its quick pacing. But, because the book was in part written as an experiment to try and preserve the unbarred emotions of the author in the moment through an extraordinarily fast composition and publication process, Couer de Lion is the perfect set-up for Mercury’s enactment: within-in its pages, the emotion and the word, the substance and the essence, become one. Indeed, it this same breathing, volatile verse that infects the reader from the pages of Mercury and from which springs an element in need of metamorphosis.

  Mecury’s five contexts are arranged as follows: Leaves, Save the World, When I Looked At Your Cock My Imagination Died, Mercury, and 0. Additionally, the author’s note, the table of contents, and each book section are pre-cursed by an alchemical symbol chosen, and in some cases designed, by the author. The book opens, fittingly, with the symbol for liquid mercury —the writer as alchemist’s most necessary substance. Before the table of contents is an alchemical heart, an emblem for vitriol, a destructive agent and native sulphate of metal, which prepares the reader to enter the book in a state ready for transmutation. From there on, the symbols in turn represent alternative or dual titles for the book’s five pieces: wood, sulfur pellets, nitric acid, the symbol for the process “to rot” (read also: to wrought), bismuth, and amalgamation. The book concludes with the star or essence symbol, signaling the success of the procedure.

  In addition to the alchemical symbols, Mercury contains multiple other layers of meaning, which add to the complexity of extraction: childhood photographs of the author and her family are interspersed in the book 0; a fan’s unsolicited, pornographic e-mail sets flight to an epistolary moment that begins the book’s third context, and an array of ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ allusions free-range across the Mercury’s pages. The composition of the line is also diverse, as the verse makes a Cagean use of white space and silence.

  Leaves opens the book with the poem “Aria”, which again situates the reader as substance, while also inviting the reader into the intimacy of the forthcoming experience through wordplay: “It keeps me empty/Just empty enough/ For you to enter me” (1). This section of Mercury comprises the first 52 pages of the book, and is constructed of titled poems that introduce the reader to Ariana’s body&soul poetics while simultaneously poking at popular culture.

  In contrast, Save the World is a series of contiguous, untitled poems that take on the terror of the megaplex: the home of multiple theatres (many wrappings) and to the author, the place where “Anything can pass before the eyes of the person” (96). This series is perhaps the most striking narrative of the book, as it confronts capitalism and consumer culture with a searing and yet sincere eye. The book is part damning the nation, part damning the self, and therefore the tone does not register as didactic or un-empathic but rather as torn and in despair with itself:

  “I belong/ to this/It’s built/ I am alive/ I must be fed/ If not today then tomorrow/ It is structures/ I am allowed to move through… And yes/at intervals I have to pay money/And I do/ I do pay it/ I pay/ I do pay/ I do and I get”

  Reines’ focus on the megaplex and its nationalist gore-shows is also a commentary on our perverse understanding of movies as “the essence of life” (83) despite that their form is immutable, non-effusive, and utterly distinct. As she repeats in Save the World for two pages: “unless you are in the movie you are not in the movie” (115-116).

  If there were one section of the book that could actually be classified as an adult film, it would be When I Looked At Your Cock My Imagination Died. Perhaps that is why it is accompanied by the alchemical symbol for nitric acid. But this context should not be to skipped over, as this gorgeous string of poems explores the affected interiority and the fragile spirit of the speaker, in spite of the section’s full-frontal beginning. In her sharp turning of the camera from female as object and whore, to female as natural and pure, Reines reminds us that whether we like it or not, these are the two roles that women have been projected into—in myth, in art, and in real life. In “Ranier Werner Fassbinder”, for instance, the speaker states her desire “to become the ally of cultural critics who at certain periods of the night too become romantic“ but then realizes that the only way to do this would be to diminish her womanhood, to filter herself through the wrong sieve:

  “To attain the truth they point to

  I have no choice but to pass through

  And agree to them, their canniness

  And history, its limits, and the obsessions

  (which are not mine) legitimated by them

  for having passed.”
  (144)

  Mercury is a book of passion that is filled with a unique magic. Though Reines’ work is hard to contextualize in the world of academic poetry, her aesthetic has been compared to Picasso (by Kevin Killian), Schwerner (by Mike McDonough), and her fellow Fencer Catherine Wagner, with whom she shares an intelligent, bawdy sense of womanhood. Whatever her artistic lineage may be, in Mercury Ariana Reines brews a deft poetic voice that creates for itself an elixir of life, and a way to write poetry “that is not made of words” (103).

  [1]Muir, M M. P. The Story of Alchemhttps://maryajournalofnewwriting.wordpress.com/reviews-and-interviews/reviews/casey-mcalduff-reviews-ariana-reines-mercury/y and the Beginnings of Chemistry. New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1903. Print. p. 65.

• Book Forum
  https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_05/8891
  Word count: 490

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  Feb/Mar 2012 Contents

  The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn

  Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival by Christopher Benfey

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  Coeur de Lion
  Richard Hell

  Ariana Reines, now thirty, has a curriculum vitae that could make her look like a star of academia. She graduated summa cum laude from Barnard and then studied with the most rarefied, radical philosophers and literary theorists at Columbia and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has translated two books from the French for Semiotext(e), as well as Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare for her own tiny Mal-O-Mar press. She was the 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry (the youngest ever) at UC Berkeley. Her first book of poems was The Cow (2006), followed by the two reviewed here, and she’s the author of a play, TELEPHONE (inspired by Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book’s extravagantly difficult, graphic extrapolation from telephone technology into schizophrenia and culture), the production of which play awed reviewers and won two Obies in 2009. Reines is interested in and has studied performance, and is an irresistible, waifish, wisecracking public impresario of her poems. She’s discussed endlessly on the Web. Whatever all that might suggest, her heart truly is in the gutter with the filthy and distraught and impossible and she’s one notch above a bag lady herself, literally. She is about nothing but poetry—poetry and decency (though possibly in that order).

  Coeur de Lion, originally published in 2007, is a long poem-series written in a confessional mode, intentionally blog-like, in which the author kisses off a boyfriend whose love letters to another girl Reines has found by hacking into his …

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• Cold Front
  http://coldfrontmag.com/reviews/review-59-thursday-by-ariana-reines/
  Word count: 369

  Review #59: ‘Thursday’ by Ariana Reines
  reviews | Wednesday, May 14th, 2014
  ariana-560x420

  COLDFRONT RATING: five
  PUBLISHED BY: Spork Press, 2013
  REVIEW BY: Timothy Liu

  thursdaycover

  Attention Ariana Reines groupies: this chapbook is a must-have keepsake. These fleet twenty-seven pages sewn between Spork’s obscenely stiff and trademark thick cardboard boards will transport you all the way from Blue Palestine to a land of gender mind-fuck: “I bite down on a horse tooth with my yellow rat’s teeth / Mild tooth of milk / Wild tooth of wolves / At the edge of mouth I am an old man / At the front of my mouth I am a girl / Wild n Mild like a bad cigar / Like a Cinderella made entirely of hair.” Heed the p(r)o(ph)etic warnings coming from our mad minx, our bewitched bitch: “I have a woman’s heart / Is the name of poetry / My cock is so huge it touches my woman’s heart all the way / Is the work of poetry // This month I have had four lovers / I have had real love for them / I hope never to see them again / I will hang latent in the dark like a bat.” There in the hot dank privacy of her Woman Cave, you just might find Platonic shadows straddling an Access-Hollywood apocalypse: “Witness me as I draw this X / Everything your eye touches is the content of your kingdom / The crown slides down over my eyes / The world exposes its egg to the Sky man / It will be Thursday again / Ashton’s stupid skateboard face and Demi’s skull face will be bathed in severe sun / People magazine will go up in flames.”

  Disclosures: Make no mistake, the level of wordplay here is downright lethal: “The lisps of death in every mouth / I have no choice but to bless you / The lord commanded that I circumcise you / The lord commanded that I circumcise my mouth / I’m on all fours losing my baby / I’m on all fours in the universal hieroglyph of prayer.”

  Favorites: Read this extended valentine in one spellbound sitting.

  Try Reines at Spork Press.

• Slate
  http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/11/04/ariana_reines_coeur_de_lion_poems_reviewed.html
  Word count: 353

  DoubleX Book of the Week: Coeur de Lion
  By Claire Lambrecht
  Coeur de Lion author Ariana Reines.
  Coeur de Lion author Ariana Reines.

  Courtesy of Fence Books

  Poetry is supposed to be a lot of things: dark, indulgent, indecipherable—like wine labels or post-modern art. Certainly not the kind of thing you’d pass from friend to friend to friend; not the kind of thing you devour guiltily on the subway; not the kind of thing that reminds you of late night AIM sessions, the note left in a locker, the Moleskine hieroglyphics you perfected as an undergraduate, the words you agree with but never said out loud.

  “It bothers me,” writes Ariana Reines, “That you cut out / American Apparel advertisements / And tape them to your bedroom wall.” It is this stinging wit coupled with vulnerability, that make Reines’ long-form epistolary poem about a messy love affair, Coeur de Lion, unique. “I never got good / At affecting the expression / Of truly contemporary beauty,” she writes with language that is spare, quixotic, and refreshingly honest.

  As a reader you cannot help but admire Reines’ willingness to wade into this insecurity; to make public the things that most people obscure from view. “Brokeness is not exactly honesty,” she writes, “But sometimes it gets close.” Sure this is a tale of a relationship gone wrong, but it illuminates something, connects something, even two people fall apart.

  At its heart, Coeur de Lion is a reminder of the way we were before we became what we are. Contrary to the “businesslike bodies” cultivated at yoga studios, the constantly ringing Blackberry, the non-IKEA furniture, we aren’t, as Lady Gaga might posit, born this way. At one time or another we were sloppy, fragile and young enough to entertain the masochism of unrequited affection. It is only from our present vantage point, Reines reminds us in 95 breathless pages, that you know what the real thing feels like.
  http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/11/04/ariana_reines_coeur_de_lion_poems_reviewed.html

• Radical Philosophy
  https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/rp177-shes-just-not-that-into-you
  Word count: 1592

  The following text has been automatically reproduced by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) algorithm. It may not have been checked over by human eyes. For matters of precision please consult the original pdf.
  She’s just not that into you
  Nina PowerRP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013)

  Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 12, Los Angeles, 2012. 144 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 108 5.

  How best to describe the colonization of the body at this particular juncture of capitalist life? Much recent theorizing has focused on a kind of war of affects where depression, euphoria and other states of being are read not merely as signs or symptoms, but as directly produced by (and productive of) particular economic relations. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s notion of ‘semio-capitalism’ has attempted to track the implica­tions of cyberspace and cybertime for the increas­ingly depressed mind and body of the contemporary subject. Herve Juvin in the recent The Coming of the Body (reviewed in RP 165, January/February 2011) has similarly attempted to describe what it means for contemporary life when the body has become the ‘bearer’ of all meaning, where every aspect of exist­ence is exchangeable and where nothing is hidden or hideable. While the trajectory of this kind of analysis is not exactly new, even where it occasionally remembers the vast feminist literature on embodiment, affect and labour from the 1960s onwards, there is something novel about the peculiar combination of consumerism, despair, visibility and immaturity that characterizes postwar life in its later stages. It is this ‘new physi­ognomy of Capital’, where ‘the generalized credit that rules every exchange … strikes within the image of its uniform emptiness the “heart of darkness” of every “personality” and every “character”‘ that Tiqqun address in this short, wilfully fragmentary text first published in France in 1999. The question of gender is raised here, there and everywhere – from the title of the book, to the extracts from magazines marketed to women that Tiqqun scatter throughout the text, to something much more nebulous and disturbing at the heart of their endeavour.

  Theory of the Young-Girl is a text that both parodies and mirrors the misogyny that resonates at the heart of a culture that celebrates youth and beauty above all else while simultaneously denigrating the bearers – young women, overwhelmingly – of these purportedly desirable characteristics. The translator of the text, poet Ariana Reines, has written of the visceral reaction the task engendered. The translation, she writes in the online magazine Triple Canopy, ‘gave me migraines, made me puke; I couldn’t sleep at night, regressed into totally out-of-character sexual behaviour’. It is indeed a book that disturbs in its relentless depiction of the fully weaponized, consumerist body of a world in which ‘[although everyone senses that their exist­ence has become a battleground upon which neuroses, phobias, somatizations, depression, and anxiety each sound a retreat, nobody has yet really grasped what is happening or what is at stake.’ The language of colo­nization, immunization, meat and fluids seeps through the abstract framework of image-analysis, economic structure and ruminations on modernity: ‘the Young-Girl doesn’t kiss you, she drools over you through her teeth. Materialism of secretion.’ If parts of the text read like a theoretically inflected revenge manual for male nerds, one assumes that this effect is – on one level – intentional. The quotation from Hamlet that appears at the beginning of the text, ‘I did love you once’, hints at past betrayals, as does the claim that ‘the “male sex” becomes both the victim and the object of its own alienated desire.’ But who is this ‘male sex’ if everyone is required to permanently ‘self-valorise’, that is to say, to be a Young-Girl? What is left of the body, love, personality when all life resembles a cross between a spreadsheet and a horoscope? ‘Unhappiness makes people consume’ reads one aphoristic statement, and yet unhappiness appears to be all there is, even as everything shrieks of fulfilment and perkiness.

  But why Young-Girl’? Who is she, and what kind of ‘theory’ is presented here? Stylistically, Tiqqun operate in the speculative void-space created by situationist-style and Agambenian portentousness – detournement meets poetic ontologizing. The style is assertoric, even where the claims made are highly evaluative. Hundreds of sen­tences begin ‘The Young-Girl is…’ This grinding repeti­tion is ameliorated only slightly by the use of varied font styles and the insertion of quotations not only from women’s magazines, but also from Baudrillard, Witold Gombrowicz’s 1937 novel Ferdydurke, spiritual instruc­tion manuals and texts on eating disorders. To imagine that Tiqqun are talking about ‘real’ young girls would be an ontic grotesquery, of course, as the Young-Girl is ‘obviously not a gendered concept’ and besides, the book is little more than ‘trash theory’. Tiqqun explain that every postwar consumerist subject, every ‘model citizen’, every bearer of power is the Young-Girl: ‘All the old figures of patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of them, even the Pope.’ And yet the book is precisely not called ‘Theory of the Wizened-Pope’. So what to make of the embrace of gendered rhetoric in the service of a theory of the ‘total war’ waged on the bodies of everyone? The political point is the claim that ‘the process of valorization, in the imperial phase, is no longer simply capitalist: IT COINCIDES WITH THE SOCIAL.’ Love has transformed from ‘Fordist seduc­tion, with its designated sites and moments, its static and proto-bourgeois couple-form, to post-Fordist seduction, diffuse, flexible, precarious and deritualized, which has extended the couple factory to the entire body and the whole of social time-space’. Tiqqun’s equation of the social with ‘youthitude’ and ‘feminitude’ is, however, oddly old-fashioned, harking back to stereotypes of women as fundamental bearers of sociability in the form of gossip: ‘Chatter, curiosity, equivocation, hearsay, the Young-Girl incarnates the fullness of improper existence, whose categories Heidegger identified.’ The Young-Girl is idle talk substantiated, inauthentic life made Queen: ‘Precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgements carries the imperative weight of the entire sovereign order, and she knows it.’

  So, to remain at the level of the inauthentic, the temptation to read ontically, for a moment, is this a book about women, or about ‘women’ (or, rather ‘young women’)? The translator notes: ‘the genderedness of French is not the only way to account for the fact that this book, as it accumulates, does become – in some sections more than others – a book about women.’ It is indeed impossible not to reify the critique as the book progresses, to map the claims onto real, if vague, images of particular kinds of bodies (‘The Young-Girl sees herself as the holder of a sacred power: the power of commodities’; ‘THE YOUNG-GIRL RESEMBLES HER PHOTO’; ‘There is surely no place where one feels/as horribly alone/as in the arms of a Young-Girl’). While Tiqqun focus on women’s magazines, much as Mary Wollstonecraft did two hundred years before, it is easy to expand their analysis to encompass develop­ments in social media that have taken place since the book’s original publication: the direct facial and self-valorizing imperatives of Facebook, the endless memetic re-postings of tumblr, fashion blogs, and so on. But what does this domination of the Spectacle really mean? The Young-Girl is ‘Living Currency’, Tiqqun claim, picking up on Pierre Klossowski’s phrase. Her arse is a war-machine: ‘The Young-Girl’s ass doesn’t possess any new value, but only the unprecedented depreciation of all values that preceded it’ But does the spectacular domination of Pippa Middleton’s posterior, say, really tell us anything about the economy? ‘In the time of the Young-Girl, woman becomes the metaphor of money’ claim Tiqqun, and a thousand billboards would surely agree: yet this cover story masks rather more dowdy truths – women may be the metaphor of money, but they don’t empirically have very much of it at the moment. Tiqqun come close at points to pinning the blame on the Young-Girl herself, even as the reader struggles in her mind to replace an image of a socially integrated teen with that of, say, Berlusconi (he is quoted here: ‘They have offended the thing I hold most dear: my image’), the Pope or any number of male authority figures. But the Young-Girl is above all alienation in the sense of being profoundly unhappy – that the book finishes with a discussion of anorexia is no accident: ‘She is a body without soul dreaming she’s a soul without a body’ Ano­rexia is ‘the desire to free oneself from a body entirely colonized by commodity symbolism’. The Young-Girl may be ‘against communism’ as one section has it, but she is well aware of the world she finds herself in. What, ultimately, would it mean to let the Young-Girl speak for herself and not through the categories imposed upon her by a culture that heralds her as the metaphysical apex of civilization while simultaneously denigrating her, or even the categories that Tiqqun mobilize to take her apart in a subtly different way? Behind every Young-Girl’s arse hides a bunch of rich white men: the task is surely not, then, to destroy the Young-Girl, but to destroy the system that makes her, and makes her so unhappy, whoever ‘she’ is.
  Buy the newest RP in print
  Download the PDF
  ReviewBerardi, body, Feminism, Hervé Juvin, memes, The Coming of the Body, Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun, women

• Variety
  https://variety.com/2009/legit/reviews/telephone-1200473713/
  Word count: 923

  Telephone
  Hello, Stein residence? Is Gertrude available? In her new play, poet Ariana Reines channels the dramatic voice of the influential writer, but to call "Telephone" a pastiche or homage would be to do it a disservice -- there's plenty of "there" there.
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  'Telephone'

  With:
  Watson, Man … Matthew Dellapina Bell, Man … Gibson Frazier Miss St., Woman … Birgit Huppuch

  Hello, Stein residence? Is Gertrude available? In her new play, poet Ariana Reines channels the dramatic voice of the influential writer, but to call “Telephone” a pastiche or homage would be to do it a disservice — there’s plenty of “there” there. In perfect concert with sound man Matt Hubbs and lighting designer Tyler Micoleau, helmer Ken Rus Schmoll pitches the absurd, occasionally hilarious play along fault lines of human communication that scrape together during encounters with Alexander Graham Bell, turn-of-the-century mental patient Miss St., and a series of men and women uncomfortably like ourselves.

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  Reines’ play starts at a central metaphor and then strikes out for the unknowable. It opens in the dark, with Pa Bell himself calling, “Watson, come here! I want you!” Bell (Gibson Frazier) and Thomas Watson (Matthew Dellapina) then launch into what looks like a 19th-century infomercial for the telephone. “Once, a voice spoke to Moses through a burning bush,” Bell enthuses to the audience. “And now any home or office can have a burning bush of its own!” continues Watson happily. What kind of weirdness is this?

  This sales pitch breaks down as the two men discover they’re not entirely sure what’s going on, either. Investigating Marsha Ginsberg’s well-conceived set, they find that the door through which Bell called Watson is set into a free-hanging flat. They’re not in Bell’s house at all. Are they dead?

  With a few carefully placed lines, Reines seems to suggest the pair are preserved forever within the telephone call that changed the world — like a crossed wire, Bell starts to murmur Haddaway’s 1993 dance hit “What is Love?” and then to speak in binary (“Oh one oh one one one one oh one”).

  The problem with the telephone is that communication is not just words. It’s drawn breaths, tentative touches, bitten-off phrases and any number of other tics that have to be seen or felt. With “Telephone,” Reines outlines communication in the negative, using words to display what’s not there. Nowhere is this more effective than in the piece’s second section, in which schizophrenic Miss St. (Birgit Huppuch, who performs her nonsense dialogue with incredible energy) speaks to us at length and finally despairs, knowing we can’t understand her.

  Miss St. is Babette S., a seamstress who was one of Jung’s patients and an early clinical example of schizophrenia. Hearing her speak, one desperately wants to understand her, but she’s oddly addicted to certain words — finality, irreplaceable — that she doesn’t comprehend. Whenever they come up, we lose her.

  It’s maddening, and highly authentic, engendering pity when Babette’s illness finally thwarts her and our mutual desire to cross the interpersonal gulf with language. This woman is dramatically alone, even with a hundred people hearing her talk.

  Designers Hubbs and Micoleau do effective work throughout, with long lighting cues and wonderful ambient noise (the cavernous sounds that accompany Watson’s fearful musings are particularly good). But the sound and lights are most effective in the play’s final section — a series of phone calls between three voices, all of which are involved in every possible relationship with one another.

  As the voices and stories bleed into each other, Micoleau creates dim pools of light on Schmoll’s tableaux. Sometimes we can see nothing clearly but a hand; other times we see silhouettes so faint we can’t even determine the performers’ individual genders. Behind all this, Reines gives us evocative snatches of dialogue: “I don’t want to talk about the past,” says one male voice. “What else is there to talk about?” asks another. Pause. “What are you wearing?”

  With exchanges like these, Reines advances the cause of adventurous theater by asking listeners to pay attention and then rewarding them for doing so, occasionally in gratifyingly silly ways. The play is frequently oblique, but not infuriatingly so. Its sense of the absurd ranges from existential terror to Stan-and-Ollie give and take (kudos to Dellapina and Frazier there, too); it wants to converse, rather than instruct. With “Telephone,” Reines has vaulted into a distinctly uncrowded category that hosts next-generational thinkers like Will Eno, and it’s a pleasure to have her there.

  Telephone

  Cherry Lane Theater; 99 seats; $30 top

  Production: A Foundry Theater presentation of a play in one act by Ariana Reines. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll.

  Creative: Set, Marsha Ginsberg; costumes, Carol Bailey; lighting, Tyler Micoleau; sound, Matt Hubbs; production stage manager, Molly Minor Eustis. Opened Feb. 10, 2009. Reviewed Feb. 9. Running time: 1 HOUR, 30 MIN.

  Cast: Watson, Man … Matthew Dellapina Bell, Man … Gibson Frazier Miss St., Woman … Birgit Huppuch

• The Volta
  http://www.thevolta.org/fridayfeature-mercury.html
  Word count: 1258

  HE VOLTA: FRIDAY FEATURE

  Mercury by Ariana Reines. Fence Books. 2011.

  Mercury

  Reviewed January 27, 2012 by Daniel Moysaenko.

  Ezra Pound (along with Ernest Fenollosa) famously analyzed Chinese characters as pictograms, finding associative meaning attached to each of the ideogram’s pictorial qualities. A dot and a king indicate “jewel” without much trouble, but how does the pictogram of a mother relate to its ideogrammatic meaning, “plum”? Pound’s lack of familiarity with the language aside, this exercise was a form of poetic play for him. Ariana Reines takes up a similar game in her newest book, Mercury. Alchemical symbols start each of the five sections and appear at intervals in the eponymous one. While some of these symbols are accurately identified via corresponding text, such as the image of what is clearly an hourglass and the corresponding mention of hours, others become a Poundian pictogrammatic riddle. What appears to be an envelope missing its bottom and standing up like an “E” is matched with “email” rather than its actual alchemical meaning, “week.” What this associative play accomplishes and how it relates to Reines’s book as a whole remains remote and mysterious, although the molding of a system of (alchemical) transformation seems to be at stake.

  Physicality surrounds Mercury. One is told to pay close attention to bodies, appearances, sensation, and most importantly, their seeming ability to provide solutions. Human beings rely on bodies to function, on sex, the anchoring sensations of pain and pleasure, and the comforting notion that what appears to be an envelope is an envelope. In her stronger poems, Reines does not just demolish the insistence on a correspondence between physicality and the non-empirical; she accepts the terms, becomes a slave to bodies and a victim of thought, enacting life’s often difficult, yet intoxicating peculiarities. I find myself enticed and unnerved by Reines’s breathless, iambic cadence, by her frank, candid observations—the crisp detail and graphic sexuality of her subject matter. But most of all, I revel in Reines’s searching. Mercury is a venture through clear writing into a realm where certainty and simplicity collide with uncertainty and the complexities of social interaction. Reines is as quick to issue aggressive proclamations as she is to retreat into timid questions, creating a complex speaker whose escapades are abundantly on display.

  In the process, one is presented with the difficulty of sincerity. After three or four poems involving hardcore sex, after all the mentions of butt plugs, fake nails, tans, and greased basketballs bouncing, I feel overwhelmed, as though stranded on some nightmarish, or at least carnivalesque porno set. Are these scenes actual experiences or opportunities for commentary? Does it matter? “I hate myself for watching,” Reines writes, mirroring the reader’s own voyeuristic position. The sex feels at odds with passages that gush with archaic cadence, syntax, and diction: “Whenever with a full heart you open the ark / Where all your promises are burning / To death and kept be the selfsame light of all things?” Reines knows just how far to push in one direction; the sentimental finds power in her turns. The inverted syntax of the first line and its “full heart” become palpable, purposeful moves of sound and image when “open the ark” appears. The second line breaks dramatically and then falls into its counterpoint (“to death”), allowing the coexistence of elegance and matter-of-fact commonplace. Reines’s ability to sustain this struggle throughout Mercury leaves me haunted. One inhabits the same shifting ground of thought and physicality that the speaker does. One must constantly move to avoid falling. And yet the poems’ demand for adjustment and engagement does not become tiring. I move naturally with the poems, hungry for the next line, the next poem, the next leap.

  In the first poem of the collection, “Aria,” one is invited in, simply, sadly, rebelliously. “It is Wednesday,” the poem begins, “I don’t know who I am / How did I get here? I don’t know / That’s a lie.” Already, the speaker’s sincerity becomes problematic as the insistence on ignorance is toppled with “that’s a lie,” but the poem continues, qualifying the speaker’s statement:
  Not totally
  It keeps me empty enough
  Just empty enough
  For you to enter me.

  In Reines’s hands, the traditional, first-poem invitation unsettles me with undertones of invasion, sex, and expectation. The speaker denies herself identity so that spectators may fill her emptiness, create her. Thus, it is the reader, rather than the speaker, who is saddled with the responsibility of representation, of determining fact from fiction. To classify Reines’s poems in Mercury as confessional would be an oversimplification and a mistake. “I want to hide what I dream / In a big boot, and wear the boot,” she writes in “The Four Seasons,” at once concealing her thoughts without ridding herself of them. Sharing, shocking, or unburdening may be the means by which the poems appear but not Reines’s essential concern. Her writing is more a function of walking, her wearing her boot and living. The poems shock and unveil incidentally, it seems. The speaker undertakes a larger investigation.

  The attempt to solve emotional problems through the physical, since the physical often seems to cause such problems, demolishes itself in Mercury. Out of anger and disgust for brutish masculinity (“When you peed in the yard […] you shaved / & greased your body and stood over me like a pig”), she admits in the poem “Area,” “I wanted to kill but had nothing to kill / But myself.” At once an explanation for the self-destructive behavior in some of the poems, these lines also point to a tragic kindness: the refusal to direct anger at others. However, such kindness may have root in fear; it is better “To kill what hides // The light in me than make you / Dead, never to leave me alone.” Rather than challenge the empirical cause of pain and then find herself alone, the speaker turns inward, taking the reader along. The physical is a dead-end. Throughout Mercury, even love feels less important than total, alchemical transformation—the magic that is poetry. “Suturing one thing that is too meaningless to the other thing that is also too meaningless,” she writes, “and wondering if I can engender an eventual accumulation out of all of it instead of a baby.” The outcome sought is not physical, and it becomes increasingly doubtful that the physical can produce the desired outcome. Even “poetry’s not made of words,” but we work with what we can.

  There is an odd balance to this vivid yet accessible work, a space between satisfaction and horror where one wants to visit often, knowing full well how easy it is to become bewildered or pulled under. Beyond her command of music and language, objective-correlative gems, pacing, and presentation of confusion and pain, Reines is able to create something ineffable. One may grope through her lines and dissect how they work but remain speechless; an element is left unsolved. And that is what makes solid poetry compelling and lasting. In Reines’s clear-cut style, she writes, “The way junky / Ladies suck on candy canes. I could disappear / Into that world forever”—the way Mercury charms and haunts, so could I.

  ***

  Daniel Moysaenko hails from Cleveland, lives in Chicago, and is a reviews editor for The Volta.

  (The Volta | Friday Feature)

• The Lit Pub
  http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/coeur-de-lion/
  Word count: 1113

  Love and Rejection In An Era of Cocksucking and Gmail
  06/11/12

  There is a fine line drawn between the intimate thoughts shared by a writer in their poetry and what the civil courts could determine to be “libel.” The balance between the type of raw, personal language that emotions like love and heartbreak demand and one that may effectuate a universal experience with which the reader can and will identify is intricate. If ever there were a book that teetered precariously (and perfectly) on that line, it would be Ariana Reines’ Coeur de Lion.

  Coeur de Lion is a detailed account of the range of feelings involved in falling out of love. Composed of a series of segmented reflections written almost entirely in second person – addressed directly to Jake, the narrator’s former object of affection – Coeur de Lion weaves seamlessly between an utterly personal narration of this love and a more objective examination of the writing process itself.

  At its most seemingly candid, it is the ramblings of a madwoman hacking into Gmail accounts, describing various sexual encounters with blunt force, recounting run-ins with mutual friends and whining about old habits that annoyed her; countering this are meditations on what the narrator desires, the nature of being a woman, the schism between “you” (her former lover) and “you” (the reader of the text – quite certainly a different person than the first “you”) and running allusions to famous works of literature and art, the motifs that grant Ariana an understanding of her own relationship.

  Early in the book this delicate balance begins to display itself quite clearly. At one moment the narrator actively questions who the “you” she is addressing in her poems truly is:

  I thought about you and how scary it is

  The way you keep your distance

  And I thought about the cherishing feeling

  I sometimes have for you.

  Thinking about a person. Surely

  That act releases something

  Into the atmosphere. A toxin?

  Now that I am not addressing you

  But the “you” of poetry

  I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.

  But this “I” is the I of poetry

  And it should be able to do more than I can do.

  In simple discourse like this, what was between Ariana and Jake instantly becomes a deeper reflection on the nature of the love poem and the disparity between the poetic “I” or “you” and the referents that these pronouns are supposed to be signifying. Moments later the text returns to a sexual encounter in Venice. Here the narration turns back to the intimate experiences unique to Ariana and Jake:

  You fucked me

  You came somewhere on me

  I had a painful zit on my upper lip

  And we were covered in dust

  Constantly, Ariana speaks so bluntly about her relationship that she seems to trivialize it. The effect is that, at times, she is trivializing Jake as well. That is why, at its most malicious, people could interpret the collection as libelous, an ill-willed revelation of just how awful Jake is, or at the very least an attempt to perturb him over his shortcomings and warn other women. But I think the intellectuality and those moments of uncertain introspection lend themselves to a better understanding of Coeur de Lion as a poet’s catharsis, wherein the narrator was able to exorcise her feelings for this boy through writing about them. Furthermore, Ariana’s concern is not centered on destroying Jake, but lending a voice to those who cannot express so poignantly the wrongs they have suffered. That is, after all, the poet’s job.

  This is why that poetic “I” could inflict much more pain and damage than the real “I,” for the narrator speaks not just for Ariana, but also for every wronged woman, mistreated and marginalized for love.

  Any review of Coeur de Lion would not be complete without further mention of its unabashed contemporariness. The theme of love in modern society runs prevalent, as Gmail espionage plays a central role and we barely reach page three before we hear about jpeg’s of other women. Reines uses this unambiguously modern setting to examine the role of women in an era where they are supposedly equal to men. Early on Reines speaks of being the “Gallery Girl” and what that entails: being interested in proximity to rich artists and buyers, or “acting pretty and disdainful,” despite being neither of those things.

  In another poem, she compares her own writing to that of the medieval chivalric genre:

  All that medieval love poetry

  With its military metaphors

  The woman as the fortress

  The errancies of gallant knights.

  Maybe long ago things were too

  Too solid, and now we live in an ether

  Of ex-sentiments, impossible

  To make sense of. . .

  This scrutiny of what it means to be a woman today and how a woman may be strong without coming of as “petty” or a “bitch” is essential to legitimizing Ariana’s right to defiantly publicize her and Jake’s intimacies in the first place. After all, some readers might see her as a madwoman for hacking Gmail, or a slut for fucking on a sidewalk in Venice, but this realness makes the text unquestionably relatable to the contemporary reader. Poems about love and failed relationships are not a new thing, but there is something about Ariana’s syntax and word choice, her blend of metaphysical reflection and sex without condoms, of words that are Greek to the contemporary reader and everyday swear words (“perfidy” and “cocksucking” need no distance between them in this epic), that makes Coeur de Lion impossible to shake off.

  Its unique exploration of writing, romance and gender roles make Coeur de Lion an essential read. While the original Mal-O-Mar edition was out of print for a while, Fence Book’s newly edited version is out now, so there is no excuse to not have this in your library.
  Jacob Steinberg
  Jacob Steinberg is the author of This isn't about Jon Ross, it's about art and Your Eyes Saw My Unformed Limbs. His Spanish poetry collection Magulladón is forthcoming on Editorial Triana in Buenos Aires. He is the editor of chronos (loves) kairos and intlitlibrary.
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