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Mercury
Composed in the direct, accessible, consciousness-piercing style readers of Ariana Reines’ first two books are wildly enamored of, Mercury comprises a group of long poems. These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, "communicated" between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema and internet porn.
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music
Makes me feel lonely
Picking a lemon
Late at night
My heart tightens
I fear nature
Your music makes me feel lonely
I must be responsible for it
I’m alive
I have this hair helmet on
I’m so alive
I say yes to the megaplex
You say it’s awful isn’t it awful
I say yeah
So what. Something sentimental
This place
I agree
Huge
We’re gonna go into the movie
. . .
The day is long enough
The day is long enough
The day is so long enough
To contain all this and more
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music
Makes me feel lonely
Picking a lemon
Late at night
My heart tightens
I fear nature
Your music makes me feel lonely
I must be responsible for it
I’m alive
I have this hair helmet on
I’m so alive
I say yes to the megaplex
You say it’s awful isn’t it awful
I say yeah
So what. Something sentimental
This place
I agree
Huge
We’re gonna go into the movie
. . .
The day is long enough
The day is long enough
The day is so long enough
To contain all this and more
242 pages, Paperback
First published October 13, 2011
18 people are currently reading
1048 people want to read
About the author
Ariana Reines
36 books401 followersAriana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007; Fence: 2011), and MERCURY (Fence: forthcoming fall 2011), plus the LP/audiobook SAVE THE WORLD starring Lili Taylor (Fence: forthcoming spring 2011).
Volumes of translation include My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, (Mal-O-Mar:2009), The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig, (Semiotext(e): 2009), and the forthcoming Preliminary Notes Toward a Theory of the YoungGirl by TIQQUN, (Semiotext(e): 2012).
TELEPHONE, her first play, was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre and presented at The Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, February 2009. The production won two Obies and a spin-off was featured in the Works+Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Fall 2009. TELEPHONE was be published in Fall 2009 in PLAY: A Journal of Plays.
Volumes of translation include My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, (Mal-O-Mar:2009), The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig, (Semiotext(e): 2009), and the forthcoming Preliminary Notes Toward a Theory of the YoungGirl by TIQQUN, (Semiotext(e): 2012).
TELEPHONE, her first play, was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre and presented at The Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, February 2009. The production won two Obies and a spin-off was featured in the Works+Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Fall 2009. TELEPHONE was be published in Fall 2009 in PLAY: A Journal of Plays.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
August 18, 2012
Scathingly ambitious—repeatedly, deliberately mawkish and cunning and innocent—and obsessed with assfucking. Reines's work is singular, perfectly Not What You Learned in MFA School, studded with grotesquerie and high sentimentality and arch intellectual clunkiness, it does not Belong, it is Other, it is part of the non-tradition or anti-poetic this writer almost picked up from Norman Dubie, the crazy-fou Beat/NY/Blake vein of American lyric, and I don't think even Ashbery grasps the nettle with such intensity and devotion and pure malformed selfness. I am not saying this well. You should read it yourself. The most challenging of all her work so far I think, grimmest and more spirited and altogether less human. The loas still want to speak to us.
January 25, 2012
So much to say about the experience of reading this, but to do so seems to run counter to the spirit of its searchingness, which actually left me feeling very still and quiet and very alive and not in need of so many words.
I gravitated especially profoundly toward the conversation with the Sun at the end of "Leaves" and in the interaction of art/memory/text/family in the final piece.
I really, really, really loved this book. You should just read it.
I gravitated especially profoundly toward the conversation with the Sun at the end of "Leaves" and in the interaction of art/memory/text/family in the final piece.
I really, really, really loved this book. You should just read it.
March 8, 2012
sexual oversharing and internet bullshit work to the poet's advantage here. this book is magic.
February 22, 2014
I think this book really is a wonderful and admirable work as one whole entity. There are some aspects I can't fully get on board with, like all the cocks and all the butt-plugs. I mean, SOME cocks and butt-plugs, sure.
February 22, 2016
Could all the women everywhere get down on our knees and scream
No fuck it let's run
We will tear statesmen apart with our bare hands
You think I'm joking?
You can come
No fuck it let's run
We will tear statesmen apart with our bare hands
You think I'm joking?
You can come
July 22, 2012
Not to judge a book by its cover, but Mercury's is too glorious to ignore: encased in a glossy silver mirror, it reflects back a distorted image of your face, grotesque and beautiful and dream-like all at once. It's fragile, this cover, easily smudged and scratched by careless fingers. Of course, alchemy takes place in a controlled setting. Once you leave the laboratory, attempt to show off the green lion with his ferocious appetite or share the crystalline delicacy of the arbor philosophorum, all bets are off. Reines has given her creation to the world, and it's potent and hard-edged and dazzling and fiercely articulate. The exterior may echo the moon's pale light, but this collection is filled with the shimmering gold of the sun.
As works of poetry go, Mercury is hefty, skipping past the 200-page mark with five distinct sections, each prefaced and scattered with alchemically inspired symbols. Reines's subject matter is similarly weighty; she tackles loss and love, the relationship between past and family, what it means to be a woman and a feminist in a society that still disdains both — whether or not we acknowledge it — and how we pay for being ourselves each day. "A woman is a project. / Is what she does / To herself" (181). The eponymous fourth section predictably endeared itself to me with this particular voice made universal: "There will always be some to come to harm, and others to learn to be what they possess, to learn to possess at all" (180). It's a wise voice in the body of a young woman.
Not all of these poems resonate with me. Reines writes about sexuality with a rawness and violence that I sidestep even in my own head, and I love her for it — love the strength and courage it takes to write with honesty and integrity about the hidden in a "world willing to live only and completely on its outermost skin" (180). The shouting all-caps intensity of "Baraka" (147-53), named for a Sufi blessing, is almost unbearable with its relentless chant of contradictory "I can't wait"s. By contrast, Reines readily admits the private moments of disingenuity that we neither understand nor endorse but find ourselves clinging to even in the company of those with whom we should feel safest, closest: "I've got secrets / I wouldn't know how to tell if I wanted to. I crossed / My heart for the things that rip me to shreds in this world. I hope to die // For you but I could not" (37).
But I want to go back to the beginning, to the first poem that caught my attention, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," and let Reines speak for herself:
And, ye gods, "Rite Aid":
The final section is the star here, as Reines alchemically (well, metaphorically) transmutes mother into daughter to make sense of her own history, augmenting symbolic language with the visual language of snapshots. I have to type up one more long excerpt because it's beautiful and begs to be remembered, shared:
I wouldn't recommend Mercury to everyone. But I wish I could. I wish I lived in that world.
As works of poetry go, Mercury is hefty, skipping past the 200-page mark with five distinct sections, each prefaced and scattered with alchemically inspired symbols. Reines's subject matter is similarly weighty; she tackles loss and love, the relationship between past and family, what it means to be a woman and a feminist in a society that still disdains both — whether or not we acknowledge it — and how we pay for being ourselves each day. "A woman is a project. / Is what she does / To herself" (181). The eponymous fourth section predictably endeared itself to me with this particular voice made universal: "There will always be some to come to harm, and others to learn to be what they possess, to learn to possess at all" (180). It's a wise voice in the body of a young woman.
Not all of these poems resonate with me. Reines writes about sexuality with a rawness and violence that I sidestep even in my own head, and I love her for it — love the strength and courage it takes to write with honesty and integrity about the hidden in a "world willing to live only and completely on its outermost skin" (180). The shouting all-caps intensity of "Baraka" (147-53), named for a Sufi blessing, is almost unbearable with its relentless chant of contradictory "I can't wait"s. By contrast, Reines readily admits the private moments of disingenuity that we neither understand nor endorse but find ourselves clinging to even in the company of those with whom we should feel safest, closest: "I've got secrets / I wouldn't know how to tell if I wanted to. I crossed / My heart for the things that rip me to shreds in this world. I hope to die // For you but I could not" (37).
But I want to go back to the beginning, to the first poem that caught my attention, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," and let Reines speak for herself:
If the mind is the sword that stabs
The heart and the heart is bleeding
In the art and the woman is bleeding
In the night where her love is as sweet
As a book in a boat on the hissing sea
Then could the bad that crosses the good
In her book be the quotient of all the good
And bad in the world but also especially
All the good and bad in any Good
Book and the least good book of all worlds?
And if that could be then could the light that flares
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? (7)
And, ye gods, "Rite Aid":
I'm not blind. I see my legs
They are blue-green
Their knees are rouge
With small hairs.
I hate these legs
But they are mine. Built for use
Not contemplation. Like how
About I walk over to you.
The scars on my knees are still there
From kindergarten, and tar
From my bike from today. Bruises too.
If I weren't so scared of life I wouldn't be here.
If I loved my legs I could be scared
Of something else, like their eventual decay
And be a woman to buy creams. You men in my life
Are how I love today. I want to be you.
I want to love myself by what I desire
The way you do, instead of seeing
How aspects of myself could be rendered
Other than what they seem when they weigh on me
By virtue of a paradoxical game in which I refuse to try
And the refusing takes up twice as much energy
as the trying would, I think.
I want to love myself for what I want, the way you do
And watch the wanting itself change my life. (17)
The final section is the star here, as Reines alchemically (well, metaphorically) transmutes mother into daughter to make sense of her own history, augmenting symbolic language with the visual language of snapshots. I have to type up one more long excerpt because it's beautiful and begs to be remembered, shared:
It was only in ceasing to cherish the past
An iron scissor from Lodz
A silken pillow from Warsaw
It was only in ceasing to cherish my objects that are proof of our sweetness
And the fact we were all slaughtered
As we want to be
As we want not to be
It was only in ceasing
To finger these things like my library of Alexandria before it was sacked
That the bright white flame caught the wick in me and burned all loss
Into a permanent soul that can never
Never be taken from me, just as no single Africa
Could be disappeared from the breast of every person who lived and died
On the middle passage, and no language died, and no god died either
Though many went to heaven at the bottom of the sea and every oblate
Object that has ever been desecrated in all history is nothing
As my dead are nothing
As my residues are nothing and everything I ever wrote to touch them is nothing
Compared to the flame that burns in the world in the breast of those peoples
Who truly have lost it all and even accumulate to to on losing
Just to die again and again for the sake of the dead who birthed us (214-5)
I wouldn't recommend Mercury to everyone. But I wish I could. I wish I lived in that world.
April 21, 2025
I want to love myself by what I desire ❤️
April 30, 2014
Everything has form.
You have form you asshole.
You have form you fucking asshole.
I think the above quote is wonderfully characteristic of the style and voice at work in this book. Simple, brilliant, profane, funny, wonderful. I don't know enough about poetry to give it a proper review but here's what I do know:
- This book (and it is a book--not merely a "collection", but a group of connected, self-refferential poems) is about alchemy, love, abjection, genitalia, oral sex, anal sex, metamorphoses, self-loathing, starvation, perversion, childbirth, contemporary film, nature, the unnatural, and of course, what it means, if anything, to write poetry in our times.
- This is worth reading for the long poem, "Save The World," alone. I think there is a perfect articulation of what it feels like to be alive right now in that piece.
- For what it's worth, I think Reines is at her best when she keeps things simple. And the poems themselves are never actually simple--they are more complex and deeply layered than I can even sometimes discern. But I do think the most eloquent poems are the ones in the later sections of the book, where the language is perhaps simpler, and where the author is cutting to the heart of the matter. The urgency, the intensity, of poems like "Baraka" are what make Reines worth reading.
You have form you asshole.
You have form you fucking asshole.
I think the above quote is wonderfully characteristic of the style and voice at work in this book. Simple, brilliant, profane, funny, wonderful. I don't know enough about poetry to give it a proper review but here's what I do know:
- This book (and it is a book--not merely a "collection", but a group of connected, self-refferential poems) is about alchemy, love, abjection, genitalia, oral sex, anal sex, metamorphoses, self-loathing, starvation, perversion, childbirth, contemporary film, nature, the unnatural, and of course, what it means, if anything, to write poetry in our times.
- This is worth reading for the long poem, "Save The World," alone. I think there is a perfect articulation of what it feels like to be alive right now in that piece.
- For what it's worth, I think Reines is at her best when she keeps things simple. And the poems themselves are never actually simple--they are more complex and deeply layered than I can even sometimes discern. But I do think the most eloquent poems are the ones in the later sections of the book, where the language is perhaps simpler, and where the author is cutting to the heart of the matter. The urgency, the intensity, of poems like "Baraka" are what make Reines worth reading.
May 9, 2012
Give up the habit of weeping for yourself, says the woman to the man with the malady of death in the novel by Marguerite Duras.
The sex parts of good books are usually the worst parts, that is too bad about good books.
Some bad books have good sex in them. And sex that I can see is somebody else's.
I want to have the sex that's mine, that sex that I have, okay.
Time to tell the difference between what's emitted and what's left over and what was there in the first place.
.
April 23, 2022
Klarte ikkje heilt å få tak i og bli engasjert i innholdet.
July 10, 2017
Poetry bundles, like short story anthologies, are difficult to rate because there are brilliant parts and less-brilliant parts, or at least parts I didn't appreciate quite as much. One poem in this bundle, "Save the World" (which is 64 pages long), was so stunning/innovative I was tempted to give the whole thing a four- or five-star rating.
But no, I restrained myself. There are 172 other pages, and among them, a good many quizzical moments. I can't say I really liked the whole bundle, but in it, I do see the seeds of a great poet.
And perhaps I'd like it better on a second reading.
But no, I restrained myself. There are 172 other pages, and among them, a good many quizzical moments. I can't say I really liked the whole bundle, but in it, I do see the seeds of a great poet.
And perhaps I'd like it better on a second reading.
January 23, 2013
Separated into five equally well wrought sections of vastly different foci, Mercury is much like the compound: liquid, surprising, ever changing. And Reines's use of repetition was, for me, one of the best structural components of the collection. She has a natural ease with language that recreates the inner monologue in a way I found both startling and satisfying. A book to suckle as much as read.
April 29, 2012
- the front & back cover is silver, a mirror (surprised me)
- a spell book, I saw the word alchemical, "cosmic willingness" 100%
- basically I loved this + would rather discuss it outside of this review box, so
- the end
- a spell book, I saw the word alchemical, "cosmic willingness" 100%
- basically I loved this + would rather discuss it outside of this review box, so
- the end
July 21, 2012
There is nothing I can possibly say to properly describe the power of mercury. Alchemy, syntax, imagery, & pure genius fucked, & birthed Ariana Reines while she was manically writing this book.
May 15, 2013
this is by far the shiniest book i own
October 15, 2015
settle in. and buckle up.
November 29, 2013
"For the people who love to laugh" indeed.
July 31, 2015
Ambitious. Amazing.
December 13, 2015
A phenomenal work by my favorite contemporary poet. A powerhouse of energy that tows the line between raw and perfectly in control.
September 4, 2018
Holy shit.
December 25, 2011
"I hear a finch / With a throat like shucking corn." pg. 24
February 16, 2025
1. Leaves
Everything in here feels very New York, very LA, very jaded with all the sex and accolades and effort she's put into it all. Here her deft maneuvering of a very sharp knife called the line break splayed phrases wide with an accuracy which maintained the illusion of wholeness, all while building something new from the rubble of completion. Woven between the disillusionment was the enjambment of neither sound nor phrase but sense, something taut with potentiality, a promising height reached too early and not maintained, not even a little bit.
If her approach to language is anything like her approach to people, she must have a trail of tidily disemboweled bodies behind her. I savored the sound of her ripping apart the line only to rebuild it only to rip it apart again. So don't ever tell me that language has been exhausted or that it even can be; it's only a matter of effort as Reines here demonstrated. But such sustained, laser-guided focus is exhausting, and the surgeon ripping off the gloves sprays hand-sweat all over the sink, leaving the disposable scrubs sodden and crumpled in the corner, someone else's problem. She shed this first section like a departure from what was expected of a contemporary poetess. From here (LAX) we depart for destinations unknown.
2. Save the World
Rupi Kaur, did they let you out of your cage? This isn't House of Leaves, so I don't know who you think you are putting a single phrase on a page and calling it a day. To be fair, any one of Reines' fragments does more damage than Kaur's entire output, but they're still punching below their weight. The gimmick of formal experiments only can carry you so far, and eventually it always collapses back into a series of lines, of sounds. Here the repetition is lazier: entire words and phrases, rather than assonance or alliteration or even rhyming.
Reines seems to have run out of steam already, resorting to swearing in an effort to mask her frustration at our collective inability to be sincere in this postmodern aesthetic prison. She uses the acerbic, acidic venom native to that tone of voice to condemn the media we consume, especially violence. Though this critique is welcome, it risks coming off as blase because so obvious, like people who call themselves anti-war. Her linguistically violent approach also risks undermining her own position, causing a self-aware ironic distancing in its delivery. The whole time I could only picture John Wick (2014), which I find so boring that it's not actually violent, just like The Substance (2024) wasn't sexual. Not saying that she has to anticipate the niche conclusions I've come to, but it's pretty obvious to me that an excess eventually wraps back around to being a deficit.
My favorite moment of this section had to be when she wrote:
We deserve this
We should be punished
We must want what they are punishing us
For wanting
They are giving it to us
...
We paid for this
This backs up my theory that we get precisely the media (news, as well as other content) that we deserve. If we didn't eat it up like starving dogs, then they wouldn't keep shoving it down our throats. We love being force-fed the slop, and they keep degrading it further, surprised at how servile our sucking has become. If only Reines had worked the sexual degradation back into this section, it might have said something interesting, but I think she thinks too highly of sex, or rather she thinks she thinks too highly of it, when she actually drags it through the mud.
3. When I Looked at Your Cock My Imagination Died
I lose track of where the disturbing sexual emails/messages end and where her poetry begins, which I guess is the point. As Dworkin worries, I also worry that this section, as well as really all of her work, effectively refutes the liberal feminist notion of sex as liberation. This section progresses formally from blocks of text to increasingly spaced out and capitalized lines, culminating in an anaphoric impatience ("I CAN'T WAIT...").
4. Mercury
Language has dissolved into trinities of symbols and repetitious stabs at translation. The connections between symbol and word are faint yet visible, and I'm glad that someone is at least still trying to insert wonder into the creative act.
5. 0
We end at the beginning, a beginning, the finality of a childhood over and done. Ekphrasis abounds, this thing parasitic on the visual and thus beholden to it, indebted to it, and otherwise windblown. I see this thing shimmering in the distance, and getting closer it's just another weather vane. There's no cows around, not even the stench of their shit or the stain of their death, only overgrown grass, effort, and even more exhaustingly, the effort of hiding effort. Who are you, Ariana, and what do you look like when you've finally peeled yourself away? Who are you really? I'll wait by this fence post till you have the bravery to find out.
Everything in here feels very New York, very LA, very jaded with all the sex and accolades and effort she's put into it all. Here her deft maneuvering of a very sharp knife called the line break splayed phrases wide with an accuracy which maintained the illusion of wholeness, all while building something new from the rubble of completion. Woven between the disillusionment was the enjambment of neither sound nor phrase but sense, something taut with potentiality, a promising height reached too early and not maintained, not even a little bit.
If her approach to language is anything like her approach to people, she must have a trail of tidily disemboweled bodies behind her. I savored the sound of her ripping apart the line only to rebuild it only to rip it apart again. So don't ever tell me that language has been exhausted or that it even can be; it's only a matter of effort as Reines here demonstrated. But such sustained, laser-guided focus is exhausting, and the surgeon ripping off the gloves sprays hand-sweat all over the sink, leaving the disposable scrubs sodden and crumpled in the corner, someone else's problem. She shed this first section like a departure from what was expected of a contemporary poetess. From here (LAX) we depart for destinations unknown.
2. Save the World
Rupi Kaur, did they let you out of your cage? This isn't House of Leaves, so I don't know who you think you are putting a single phrase on a page and calling it a day. To be fair, any one of Reines' fragments does more damage than Kaur's entire output, but they're still punching below their weight. The gimmick of formal experiments only can carry you so far, and eventually it always collapses back into a series of lines, of sounds. Here the repetition is lazier: entire words and phrases, rather than assonance or alliteration or even rhyming.
Reines seems to have run out of steam already, resorting to swearing in an effort to mask her frustration at our collective inability to be sincere in this postmodern aesthetic prison. She uses the acerbic, acidic venom native to that tone of voice to condemn the media we consume, especially violence. Though this critique is welcome, it risks coming off as blase because so obvious, like people who call themselves anti-war. Her linguistically violent approach also risks undermining her own position, causing a self-aware ironic distancing in its delivery. The whole time I could only picture John Wick (2014), which I find so boring that it's not actually violent, just like The Substance (2024) wasn't sexual. Not saying that she has to anticipate the niche conclusions I've come to, but it's pretty obvious to me that an excess eventually wraps back around to being a deficit.
My favorite moment of this section had to be when she wrote:
We deserve this
We should be punished
We must want what they are punishing us
For wanting
They are giving it to us
...
We paid for this
This backs up my theory that we get precisely the media (news, as well as other content) that we deserve. If we didn't eat it up like starving dogs, then they wouldn't keep shoving it down our throats. We love being force-fed the slop, and they keep degrading it further, surprised at how servile our sucking has become. If only Reines had worked the sexual degradation back into this section, it might have said something interesting, but I think she thinks too highly of sex, or rather she thinks she thinks too highly of it, when she actually drags it through the mud.
3. When I Looked at Your Cock My Imagination Died
I lose track of where the disturbing sexual emails/messages end and where her poetry begins, which I guess is the point. As Dworkin worries, I also worry that this section, as well as really all of her work, effectively refutes the liberal feminist notion of sex as liberation. This section progresses formally from blocks of text to increasingly spaced out and capitalized lines, culminating in an anaphoric impatience ("I CAN'T WAIT...").
4. Mercury
Language has dissolved into trinities of symbols and repetitious stabs at translation. The connections between symbol and word are faint yet visible, and I'm glad that someone is at least still trying to insert wonder into the creative act.
5. 0
We end at the beginning, a beginning, the finality of a childhood over and done. Ekphrasis abounds, this thing parasitic on the visual and thus beholden to it, indebted to it, and otherwise windblown. I see this thing shimmering in the distance, and getting closer it's just another weather vane. There's no cows around, not even the stench of their shit or the stain of their death, only overgrown grass, effort, and even more exhaustingly, the effort of hiding effort. Who are you, Ariana, and what do you look like when you've finally peeled yourself away? Who are you really? I'll wait by this fence post till you have the bravery to find out.
April 14, 2020
Hmmm. Okay, I still don't really get it.
Straining for a fresh flavour of genre amidst reading very emotionally taxing fictions, I decide I shall reread Mercury (which has been partially read for a college course last year).
And I am sad to report that I still do not understand nor can meaningfully appreciate most of this collection. I will confess I am a total philistine when it comes to poetry, so I might just lack the faculties to appreciate it but then again, shouldn't good poetry be at least somewhat universally appealing?
Don't get me wrong, there were really promisingly beautiful parts, like the "We Can Do It" poem, which ends like this:
I know to suffer
Alone is not an innovation,
You know this one
Too. And to divine
Wisdom in a purl
Of blood takes art
In this open world
You know.
It takes art
And you have it.
Woah, that takes my breath away. But the rest of the poems tend to be a rambly random jumble of sex, feminism, and alchemy words that makes you go "what did I just read", like:
Fuck you.
Everything has form.
You have form you asshole.
You have form you fucking asshole.
Maybe someone can explain this book to me someday and I will have a revelation.
Straining for a fresh flavour of genre amidst reading very emotionally taxing fictions, I decide I shall reread Mercury (which has been partially read for a college course last year).
And I am sad to report that I still do not understand nor can meaningfully appreciate most of this collection. I will confess I am a total philistine when it comes to poetry, so I might just lack the faculties to appreciate it but then again, shouldn't good poetry be at least somewhat universally appealing?
Don't get me wrong, there were really promisingly beautiful parts, like the "We Can Do It" poem, which ends like this:
I know to suffer
Alone is not an innovation,
You know this one
Too. And to divine
Wisdom in a purl
Of blood takes art
In this open world
You know.
It takes art
And you have it.
Woah, that takes my breath away. But the rest of the poems tend to be a rambly random jumble of sex, feminism, and alchemy words that makes you go "what did I just read", like:
Fuck you.
Everything has form.
You have form you asshole.
You have form you fucking asshole.
Maybe someone can explain this book to me someday and I will have a revelation.
June 17, 2018
I was very impressed by ariana's language, wit and person in this collection of poetry.
It mixes the sincere with the mythical with the popular with the never ending with the problems in the world
I can have a hard time holding my concentration when reading poetry, but with this read everything very well balanced, narrated and followed through. Elements reappearing. Emotions changing, doubts consistent.
I was especially fond of the beginning og the 4th part Mercury were somehow a spell or chant got established with words and symbols. The mix of elements and things seemed effortless but smart, such as the my general feel of the book would be.
I also liked second part, Save The world and its undertaking of The Watchmen and what is wrong here with this world. Go back and forth between scenes, emotions and pictures. This way I as a reader was able to follow along, venture out with a leash pulling me back when time was ripe for us to move on.
great work.
It mixes the sincere with the mythical with the popular with the never ending with the problems in the world
I can have a hard time holding my concentration when reading poetry, but with this read everything very well balanced, narrated and followed through. Elements reappearing. Emotions changing, doubts consistent.
I was especially fond of the beginning og the 4th part Mercury were somehow a spell or chant got established with words and symbols. The mix of elements and things seemed effortless but smart, such as the my general feel of the book would be.
I also liked second part, Save The world and its undertaking of The Watchmen and what is wrong here with this world. Go back and forth between scenes, emotions and pictures. This way I as a reader was able to follow along, venture out with a leash pulling me back when time was ripe for us to move on.
great work.
October 21, 2024
“The light from the lamp could be light coming from a great distance, it could be a great distance away, and the wall could be snow it is so beautiful, he said. His head looking up the wall, his eyes looking up it, he said, that nail in the wall could also be beautiful, for so far away.”
Started and finished in london. A nice poetry collection which incorporates glyphs and pictographs (seemingly original)
Started and finished in london. A nice poetry collection which incorporates glyphs and pictographs (seemingly original)
July 14, 2020
I read it in Norwegian, but I can't be bothered to add it to GR. Anyway. Not my kind of poetry, but I admit I was fascinated by the choice of making an entire (pages long) poem about the experience of watching the movie Watchmen. A choice that would never have occurred to me personally ever.
September 26, 2019
so grateful there's a poem about seeing watchmen in theatres
March 29, 2020
A Goddamn Treasure
May 17, 2020
Better then the Cow!
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