Reines - A Sand Book

She gave poetry guts, and she gave me and so many other female poets/queer poets/weirdo poets the guts to be female/queer/weird. JENNY ZHANG, Rookie Ariana Reines is something special, and her book Mercury is a shining achievement. I revere it. RACHEL KUSHNER, author of The Mars Room It appears as if Reines, who adores Ashbery (their nocturnal preoccupations and essentially religious sensibilities have much in common), will soon become as central to American poetry today as Ashbery... became during the Seventies or Eighties. FRANK GUAN, n+1 Reiness new book is longer, more complex, and in ways more ambitious than her two previous books.

Mercury is still gritty and first-person, but its the aria in Ariana, its 239 pages into infinity, on winged heels and a prayer. Its alchemy achieved, and so vital as to exemplify poetry today in its guttural full glory. RICHARD HELL, Bookforum I applaud Arianas desire to be disrespectful, lewd, broken, narcissisticall the unforgivable female crimes which if instead were committed by humans would just be called hot. EILEEN MYLES, Harriet Lines that make me want to have sex on the moon. THURSTON MOORE Scary in the best possible way. RICHARD FOREMAN Copyright 2019 Ariana Reines All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210. Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Reines, Ariana, author. Title: A sand book / Ariana Reines.

Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019005819 | ISBN 9781947793323 (hardcover) ISBN 9781947793330 (ebook) Classification: LCC PS3618.E56455 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005819 First U.S. 19962005, Cast Porcelain, 21 36 19 inches (53.3 91.4 48.3 cm) Liz Larner, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles : Veve for the Voodoo Loa named (Maman) Brigitte (Chris / Chrkl, 2007, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VeveBrigitte.svg) : Photo by Ariana Reines : Photo by Ariana Reines : Herm of Dionysos , from the Workshop of Boethos of Kalchedon ( Catalogue du muse Alaoui, 1897-1922 , original bronze with ivory inlay ca. 100-50 BCE, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mahdia_pilier_Leroux.jpg) : Photo by Ariana Reines : Photo by Ariana Reines Adjusting type size may change line breaks. 100-50 BCE, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mahdia_pilier_Leroux.jpg) : Photo by Ariana Reines : Photo by Ariana Reines Adjusting type size may change line breaks.

Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. CONTENTS NO MORE SAND ART, no sand book, no masters.
Paul Celan I leave I depart I quit I forsake I abandon I give up I let down There are things not found in books Or perhaps you have been reading the wrong ones Pulling down from a high shelf The fabulous album only to find it Writhing with worms.Nothing touches Me until I permit it.Not even kindness Can disturb my sleep.I have Been to caves, sure.I have lived In them.I lay on the mosses in Valhalla But what difference would it make To you? There are nectars hidden In your body.Suck your own tongue. Long after I stopped participating Those images pursued me I found myself turning from them Even in the small light before dawn To meet the face of my own body Still taut and strong, almost too Strong a house for so much shame Not mine alone but also yours And my brothers, lots of peoples I know it was irrational, for whom I saw Myself responsible and to whom I wished to remain hospitable. We had all been pursuing our own Disintegration for so long by then That by the time the other side Began to raise a more coherent Complaint against us we devolved With such ease and swiftness it seemed To alarm even our enemies.By then Many of us had succumbed to quivering Idiocy while others drew vitality from new Careers as public scolds.Behind these Middle-management professors were at pains To display their faultless views lest they too Find censure, infamy, unemployment and death At the hands of an enraged public Individuals in such pain and torment And such confusion hardly anyone dared Ask more of them than that they not shoot And in fact many of us willed them to shoot And some of us were the shooters And shoot we did, and got us square In the heart and in the face, which anyway We had been preparing these long years For bullets and explosions and whatever Else.A vast unpaid army Of self-destructors, false comrades, impotent Brainiacs who wished to appear to be kind Everything we did for our government And the corporations that served it we did for free In exchange for the privilege of watching one Another break down.Sometimes we were the ones Doing the breaking.We would comfort one another Afterward, congratulating each other on the fortitude It took to display such vulnerability.The demonstration Of an infirmity followed by a self-justificatory recuperation Of our own means and our own ends, in short, of ourselves And our respect for ourselvesthis amounted to the dominant Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing, which partook Of modes of oratory and of polemic, of intimate Journals and of statements from on high issued by public Figures, whom at one time or another we all mistook ourselves for Anyway it wasnt working.None of it was working. Not our ostentation and not the uses we put our suffering To, the guilt- and schadenfreude-based attention We extracted from our friends and followers , and even the passing Sensation of true sincerity, of actual truth, quickly emulsified Into the great and the terrible metastasizing whole. To the point it began to seem wisest to publish only Within the confines of our own flesh, but our interiors Had their biometrics too, and were functions not only Of stardust, the universe as we now were prone to addressing The godhead, but also of every mean and median of the selfsame Vicious culture that drove us to retreat into the jail of our own bones And the cramped confines of our swollen veins and ducts in the first place Our skin was the same wall they talked about on the news And our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew Images could drop from above like the pendulum in The Pit And the Pendulum or killer drones to shatter the face of our lover Into contemporaneous pasts, futures, celebrities, and other Lovers all of whom our attention paid equally in confusion And longing, and a fleeting sense like passing ghosts Of a barely remarked upon catastrophe that was over Both before and after it was too late.We were ancient Creatures, built for love and war.Everything said so And we could not face how abstract it was all becoming Because it was also all the opposite of abstract, it was Our flesh, our mothers bloodied forehead On the floor of Penn Station, and wherever we hid Our face, amid a crowd of stars for example as Yeats Once put it, and for stars insert celebrities Or astrology here, your choice, and even when We closed our eyes, all this was all we looked at Every day all day.It was all we could see.