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Wave of Blood
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, WAVE OF BLOOD is a furious, strange and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.
- GenresPoetry
160 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2024
16 people are currently reading
858 people want to read
About the author
Ariana Reines
36 books406 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 33 reviews
September 20, 2025
I find the writing obnoxiously self-involved. The centering of her grief in relation to the genocide that is being committed by Israel against the Palestinians is outrageous to me. At one point she writes that “ the atrocity went on in her body, around which no human being encircled their arms.” Yes she’s the victim of course. I find that completely delusional.
She also writes that “ [she] went to Haiti ostensibly as a relief worker, but really, it was a spiritual pilgrimage.” How can someone be so self-involved to use a humanitarian crisis as a pretext to find herself a voodoo spiritual leader and admit it without irony?! In the same passage she writes that she’s ashamed to admit that she was in need of a teacher. Is that really what she’s ashamed about?!
She also writes that “ [she] went to Haiti ostensibly as a relief worker, but really, it was a spiritual pilgrimage.” How can someone be so self-involved to use a humanitarian crisis as a pretext to find herself a voodoo spiritual leader and admit it without irony?! In the same passage she writes that she’s ashamed to admit that she was in need of a teacher. Is that really what she’s ashamed about?!
Read
December 22, 2024hearts on fire, a coming down to earth, unwillingly: grief
July 4, 2025
she remains one of the bravest writers we’ve got
September 17, 2025
a stunning representation of the possibility of an urgent role of poetry in political life
Read
March 7, 2025My favorite poet, yet again, channeling cosmic language. I read this as a sort of epic, tracing a year of war, paralleled by family pain, all marked through presentations at various European cities on a book tour organized for no reason
July 25, 2025
almost unreal in its truthfulness.. like pulling the ace of swords
May 16, 2025
THIS CAME OUT last fall from a British publisher, Divided Publishing, and I don't happen to know whether there will be a U.S. edition or not. It's not hard to obtain--I got my copy from Seattle's Open Books--and the price is printed on the back cover in dollars as well as pounds, so maybe this edition is it. In other words, don't wait, because if you are at all interested in Ariana Reines, you ought to read it.
The book is a good many things at once. It was written after October 7, 2023, and addresses that horror and the horrors that have followed. Reines is Jewish, and her family, like most Jewish families, was affected by the Holocaust; lest you think her engagement with Judaism and history follows familiar lines, though, ponder this: "The real tradition isn't written in our books. The real Judaism is hidden in women's bodies." If that pulled you up short--wait, what? what do you mean?--well, she's not done.
"Tears sprang to my eyes as I wrote the last sentence. How dare I write such a thing.
I have been sick with shame and dazed with blood. I will be told that such a feeling is unrevolutionary and that to give in to it is bourgeois.
I have been searching for a way to speak accurately and protest accurately that does not masculinize me, that does not find me hardening my speech into the eroticized militancy of the noble freedom fighter."
And that's the hybrid of emotional honesty and intellectual rigor that makes Reines one of a kind. Wave of Blood consistently achieves that hybrid.
Another surprising hybrid: Reines could be considered a confessional poet, and this book is particularly remarkable for her candor about her family, especially her mother. But she's also a visionary poet. Most visionary poets are too spellbound by the eternal and infinite to devote much time to the muck and muddle of the here and now, but not Reines. "I'm someone who has had overpowering mystical experiences. [...] These experiences are here to be had, by all of us, by anyone who wants them. [...] Having experienced such things, it behooves the experiencer to cultivate and create an active relationship with these new regions of consciousness--or else they'll just close back up." A grounded visionary...how many of those have we had? Traherne, Dickinson, I would say Yeats...but they are scarce. And Reines is one.
There's more: glimpses of a reading tour of Europe, interpretations of Milton, quite a few poems (including "Disinhibitor," the brilliant one that showed up in the New Yorker, of all places). I'll close with this:
"Poetry isn't a profession
A person simply goes into. You have
To be fucked up to do this and especially
To stay. It does not attract the best
Or the brightest. We are some of the most
Sanctimonious low-attention-span narcissists
Around. But it gave me life
Which I had longed to see naked
And it held me up to living
In a very naked way
And showed me breathing
And gave me space..."
The book is a good many things at once. It was written after October 7, 2023, and addresses that horror and the horrors that have followed. Reines is Jewish, and her family, like most Jewish families, was affected by the Holocaust; lest you think her engagement with Judaism and history follows familiar lines, though, ponder this: "The real tradition isn't written in our books. The real Judaism is hidden in women's bodies." If that pulled you up short--wait, what? what do you mean?--well, she's not done.
"Tears sprang to my eyes as I wrote the last sentence. How dare I write such a thing.
I have been sick with shame and dazed with blood. I will be told that such a feeling is unrevolutionary and that to give in to it is bourgeois.
I have been searching for a way to speak accurately and protest accurately that does not masculinize me, that does not find me hardening my speech into the eroticized militancy of the noble freedom fighter."
And that's the hybrid of emotional honesty and intellectual rigor that makes Reines one of a kind. Wave of Blood consistently achieves that hybrid.
Another surprising hybrid: Reines could be considered a confessional poet, and this book is particularly remarkable for her candor about her family, especially her mother. But she's also a visionary poet. Most visionary poets are too spellbound by the eternal and infinite to devote much time to the muck and muddle of the here and now, but not Reines. "I'm someone who has had overpowering mystical experiences. [...] These experiences are here to be had, by all of us, by anyone who wants them. [...] Having experienced such things, it behooves the experiencer to cultivate and create an active relationship with these new regions of consciousness--or else they'll just close back up." A grounded visionary...how many of those have we had? Traherne, Dickinson, I would say Yeats...but they are scarce. And Reines is one.
There's more: glimpses of a reading tour of Europe, interpretations of Milton, quite a few poems (including "Disinhibitor," the brilliant one that showed up in the New Yorker, of all places). I'll close with this:
"Poetry isn't a profession
A person simply goes into. You have
To be fucked up to do this and especially
To stay. It does not attract the best
Or the brightest. We are some of the most
Sanctimonious low-attention-span narcissists
Around. But it gave me life
Which I had longed to see naked
And it held me up to living
In a very naked way
And showed me breathing
And gave me space..."
January 10, 2026
Formally and stylistically innovative, Wave of Blood moves between prose and poetry with a captivating hybridity, mostly using a candid direct address that feels distinct from the voice in A Sand Book. This book is addressed to a trusted reader, a member of the Invisible College (the mystically inclined study society Reines began during the COVID-19 pandemic). The Invisible College itself is also an addressee, and we are becoming or are already a part of it. This approach allows the reader to feel like a confidant or an initiate of a sacred order. This book would see an unknowable and awesome divine in defense of the human heart.
Reqd my full review online: https://raintaxi.com/wave-of-blood/ https://raintaxi.com/wave-of-blood/
Reqd my full review online: https://raintaxi.com/wave-of-blood/ https://raintaxi.com/wave-of-blood/
March 8, 2025
Repetitive and derivative. The existence of this book is curious
January 14, 2026
This book is an incredible account of vulnerability and honesty. But even more than that - it's resistance work.
Ariana Reines writes like many of us whose Jewishness in the world has become (or always was) unpredictable, contorted or amorphous. For Ariana her Jewish identity was never something that was handed to her on a platter, ready to don. Rather, it is something she has had to construct and mould herself - and seemingly alone at that.
The pain is effusive, and it’s a true account of what helplessness can and does feel like when you have an any sort of connection to a land being torn apart for conquest and domination. Reines is a living testament to the long-term effects of Jewish intergenerational trauma, the way in which it collapses our relationships, strains our familial dynamics and breeds senses of guilt, resentment and heartache.
To watch our mothers and fathers splinter at the soul because of the weight of internalized, generationally passed-down trauma never seems to become easier to contend with. And now, as Zionist thought seeks to weaponize that isolating vulnerability for political gain and ethnonationalistic supremacy in Palestine, Reines is a clear example of what is left of the leftist diasporic Jew: resentment, agony and inner turmoil.
Wave of Blood is a testimony to feminist Jewish thought and a rejection of the pre-ordained position in the world that many systems currently in place would have her assume. In an unapologetic testimonial of everything that is pulling her apart at the seams, Ariana Reines reveals, whether intentionally or not, what she truly, so desperately seeks: to reject the isolation that is cast upon her as a modern anti-Zionist Jew. This book cries out in pain, and in its explosion of vulnerability, casts lines for others to hold onto.
Reading this book, I feel a little less alone. And in that, Ariana and I are both a little more sane for it.
--------------------
*****A final, but most important note:
I saw some reviewer on here claiming that the writing was “obnoxiously self-involved” and that Reines was “centring her grief in relation to the genocide”
This is literally an account of a Jewish woman reckoning with her culture and identity being co-opted to commit mass murder. Zionism, quite literally in the way it works, weaponizes Jewish grief to normalize political violence. Exploring the deep, agonizing reality of this is incredibly important work and no amount of BS virtue signalling is going to change that.
So yeah, when Jewish grief (a grief that is collectively shared, that belongs to all of us) is used to commit atrocities that were once inflicted on our bodies, I can understand how Ariana could feel that "the atrocity went on in her body, around which no human being encircled their arms."
I think we’d all be better off if we put more than five minutes into our reviews of books that people committed years towards compiling.
Ariana Reines writes like many of us whose Jewishness in the world has become (or always was) unpredictable, contorted or amorphous. For Ariana her Jewish identity was never something that was handed to her on a platter, ready to don. Rather, it is something she has had to construct and mould herself - and seemingly alone at that.
The pain is effusive, and it’s a true account of what helplessness can and does feel like when you have an any sort of connection to a land being torn apart for conquest and domination. Reines is a living testament to the long-term effects of Jewish intergenerational trauma, the way in which it collapses our relationships, strains our familial dynamics and breeds senses of guilt, resentment and heartache.
To watch our mothers and fathers splinter at the soul because of the weight of internalized, generationally passed-down trauma never seems to become easier to contend with. And now, as Zionist thought seeks to weaponize that isolating vulnerability for political gain and ethnonationalistic supremacy in Palestine, Reines is a clear example of what is left of the leftist diasporic Jew: resentment, agony and inner turmoil.
Wave of Blood is a testimony to feminist Jewish thought and a rejection of the pre-ordained position in the world that many systems currently in place would have her assume. In an unapologetic testimonial of everything that is pulling her apart at the seams, Ariana Reines reveals, whether intentionally or not, what she truly, so desperately seeks: to reject the isolation that is cast upon her as a modern anti-Zionist Jew. This book cries out in pain, and in its explosion of vulnerability, casts lines for others to hold onto.
Reading this book, I feel a little less alone. And in that, Ariana and I are both a little more sane for it.
--------------------
*****A final, but most important note:
I saw some reviewer on here claiming that the writing was “obnoxiously self-involved” and that Reines was “centring her grief in relation to the genocide”
This is literally an account of a Jewish woman reckoning with her culture and identity being co-opted to commit mass murder. Zionism, quite literally in the way it works, weaponizes Jewish grief to normalize political violence. Exploring the deep, agonizing reality of this is incredibly important work and no amount of BS virtue signalling is going to change that.
So yeah, when Jewish grief (a grief that is collectively shared, that belongs to all of us) is used to commit atrocities that were once inflicted on our bodies, I can understand how Ariana could feel that "the atrocity went on in her body, around which no human being encircled their arms."
I think we’d all be better off if we put more than five minutes into our reviews of books that people committed years towards compiling.
October 15, 2024
“A tortured soul can have social value – within certain
limits. Including temporal limits.
Suffering in a state of lucidity, you can draw out the
repression and compacted pain in others.
But you must be careful not to go overboard.
And you must carefully demarcate the field of action.
Because every form of pollution can enter the procedure,
from every direction, at and from every point in time.
It is like performing field surgery on yourself. Suppose
no physician were available or qualified to operate on a
case like yours? Suppose no physician existed with such
qualifications?
Such an act would test – overwhelm – your capacities,
especially in the tricky parts, where you must navigate
in spite of your inner weakness and general lack of perspective on the overall dynamic.”
(…)
“Something very
Young in adults is drawn out by the witness
Of suffering and I admit
It disturbs me. Something eternally young
But not in a good way. Child in them
Ravaged and very hungry and wanting
You suffering with them. The watcher
Becomes consumed with her own pain.
But am I succumbing to judgement, writing these lines?
Her own pain overwhelms the bleeding
Child in her eye. She only hears the child
In her: the rich hypocritical one that paid for the bombs.
I am in pain, says the voice all around me,
I am in pain, says everything I see
Everything I see says, Don’t leave me alone.”
Written between October '23 and April '24, absorbed in - and offering a highly original, radical, self-sacrificing view on intergenerational trauma and the cultural and societal mechanisms of suffering, this book should be one of the most important accounts of this moment in time. Reading it offered some sensibility also.
limits. Including temporal limits.
Suffering in a state of lucidity, you can draw out the
repression and compacted pain in others.
But you must be careful not to go overboard.
And you must carefully demarcate the field of action.
Because every form of pollution can enter the procedure,
from every direction, at and from every point in time.
It is like performing field surgery on yourself. Suppose
no physician were available or qualified to operate on a
case like yours? Suppose no physician existed with such
qualifications?
Such an act would test – overwhelm – your capacities,
especially in the tricky parts, where you must navigate
in spite of your inner weakness and general lack of perspective on the overall dynamic.”
(…)
“Something very
Young in adults is drawn out by the witness
Of suffering and I admit
It disturbs me. Something eternally young
But not in a good way. Child in them
Ravaged and very hungry and wanting
You suffering with them. The watcher
Becomes consumed with her own pain.
But am I succumbing to judgement, writing these lines?
Her own pain overwhelms the bleeding
Child in her eye. She only hears the child
In her: the rich hypocritical one that paid for the bombs.
I am in pain, says the voice all around me,
I am in pain, says everything I see
Everything I see says, Don’t leave me alone.”
Written between October '23 and April '24, absorbed in - and offering a highly original, radical, self-sacrificing view on intergenerational trauma and the cultural and societal mechanisms of suffering, this book should be one of the most important accounts of this moment in time. Reading it offered some sensibility also.
January 14, 2025
Ariana Reines is a vital poet of our moment, and a personal inspiration in her approach to mystery, the role of the sacred in contemporary life, the role of poetry as a method of divination, and a heterodox interpersonal ethics that might fuse all of the above. This book is a self-excoriating stare into the abyss that she profoundly argues we are all responsible for and can't position ourselves above or beyond - or must not, rather, for the sake of our souls, our sanity, our ancestors. Taking Invisible College classes and reading The Changing Light at Sandover with her guidance has profoundly changed how I view poetry and spirituality. This is a bracing read for how morally uncomfortable it may make us and how few concrete answers it can provide, but its a powerful balm as a document of the spiritual crises of our times - and how we contribute to them by assigning blame, shutting off our hearts and shutting down communication, or grasping for a false sense of moral superiority. Very urgent book and sure to be a friend to anyone who feels like they are in spiritual crisis (which should be everyone, more or less, at the moment).
March 27, 2025
tenía la idea de que era un libro de poemas, pero es algo muy extraño: una confesión, quizá. un largo e incómodamente íntimo ensayo sobre el dolor y la pérdida, sobre la guerra: sobre ser judía durante el genocidio en palestina, sobre tener una abuela que añora la vida en israel, un papá ausente y una mamá esquizofrénica que eventualmente se suicida. hay cierto grado de ridículo en escribir que hace un mes no duermes porque piensas en la guerra, pero me pareció un gesto honesto. a fin de cuentas, el activismo no es la única salida de la injusticia: también está el dolor.
“part of what i am trying to do is figure out how to be american and how to be my mother's daughter”
“i owe so much sanity to nail salons”
“the fool is the poet card, and it's thanks to foolishness i have gradually been able to untie the knot of my own family, history, destiny”
“part of what i am trying to do is figure out how to be american and how to be my mother's daughter”
“i owe so much sanity to nail salons”
“the fool is the poet card, and it's thanks to foolishness i have gradually been able to untie the knot of my own family, history, destiny”
March 8, 2025
Burroughs cut ups
Letting god make your decisions
The weakness of language
Fathering and husbanding your mother
The town you learned to be alone
Longing for a teacher you can respect
Technocrats want subjugation by machines (slave minds)
The people who can see you for who you really are always could Even before your plastic surgery. They know your true beauty.
The sun falls on my head like a priestly hand—the gentleness of its blessing is almost enraging—why won’t it slap me, why won’t it push me, why won’t it force me to become better than I am.
Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?
What I was trying to prepare myself for spiritually was to stay human in the face of the computer.
Letting god make your decisions
The weakness of language
Fathering and husbanding your mother
The town you learned to be alone
Longing for a teacher you can respect
Technocrats want subjugation by machines (slave minds)
The people who can see you for who you really are always could Even before your plastic surgery. They know your true beauty.
The sun falls on my head like a priestly hand—the gentleness of its blessing is almost enraging—why won’t it slap me, why won’t it push me, why won’t it force me to become better than I am.
Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?
What I was trying to prepare myself for spiritually was to stay human in the face of the computer.
April 27, 2025
an incredibly complex longform essay / poem about identity and grief and the horror of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, and what that means when that genocide intersects with your identity and grief. the alternating between casual, plainspoken essay / direct speech address and the more abstract poetry stuff is pretty jarring, but also probably a necessary presentation for what Reines is doing here, because metaphor is often the only way to get at deeply conflicting or painful emotions.
November 10, 2024
"We're all going to be hazed and razed in this time. My greatest prayer is for the people of conscience and the people of love to deeply search our hearts and souls in this time, and to make what we can of this search."
February 6, 2025
her words helped me to shift grief, move it around and spit it out like a loose tooth! i’m eternally grateful for randomly picking this up at my local gallery, i felt so held by the author, I hope she feels held by us too, in some way.
October 8, 2025
Don't leave me alone in a room with Ariana Reines, she'll turn me into a trope.
Expect a long internal monologue; honest, but self-involved. Yes pretentious, but isn't it brave to be a disaster? Think of it as live streaming a drug induced therapy session minus the cringe of it all.
Expect a long internal monologue; honest, but self-involved. Yes pretentious, but isn't it brave to be a disaster? Think of it as live streaming a drug induced therapy session minus the cringe of it all.
December 8, 2025
I think for some people this book isn't a great introduction to her poetry. I doubted in the beginning, too. However, she is very honest about her paradoxical conflicts.This created trust in me, and I couldn't stop reading it.
November 6, 2024
Vital.
November 18, 2024
wow, a sizzling book, alive in your hands, engaged with the form itself–poetry as a vehicle into the world, the self, violence, trauma and identity.
January 6, 2025
Necessary reading.
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January 20, 2025an enormous swelling through reading and especially when finishing this book. hope and recognition and momentum result. thank you for this book, ariana.
February 1, 2025
Beautiful beautiful, if that can even encapsulate it
March 9, 2025
“Poetry as I understand it is an art so naked it almost doesn’t exist.”
April 8, 2025
vital, medicinal, a marvel
instructive and tempering
needed, healing & apt, for me (truly, found me at exactly the right moment, when i needed it most)
instructive and tempering
needed, healing & apt, for me (truly, found me at exactly the right moment, when i needed it most)
April 18, 2025
too many parallels/ this reading makes/ hands tremble and heart beat stronger/ with excitation
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May 2, 2025simply....wow
Read
July 28, 2025Final boss of making global tragedy about herself
September 24, 2025
Anna gave me for my bday with her notes in the margins. Absolutely incredible and very brave. Five stars because-as always- ariana reines gets it
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews