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The Rose: Poems
In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines navigates the intersection of power and surrender.
Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.
Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.
- GenresPoetry
135 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 15, 2025
11 people are currently reading
2656 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 - 29 of 29 reviews
March 31, 2025
The Rose is a provocative collection of poetry that, like the flower from which it takes its name, offers sweetness or suffering depending on your approach. This is raw unadulterated poetry, cut with black tar candor and heated until incandescent over a fierce flame of lasciviousness.
Many of the poems are quite sexually charged (though seldom erotic). One of my favorites in the collection, ‘After Coming’, cheerfully scuppers the notion of “post nut clarity” and replaces it with a beguiling post orgasmic mania- one in which the poet is able to extract validation from her partner. It is a striking piece that explores the sometimes transactional nature of relationships.
‘Eros is bad’ ruminates on falling in love. Is it a happy accident like Alice floating downward or does it require more deliberate intention like Orpheus descending into the underworld?
Medea, Aphrodite, and Prometheus all receive mentions and lend their mythological symbolism to the poetry. Yet, despite this occasional broadside from the western cannon the poems feel contemporary, experimental and suffused with vivid but oblique imagery. A skillful poet, Ariana Reines, has transformed the barren underworld into a fertile womb from whence chimeric (and thirsty) poetry springs forth.
Many of the poems are quite sexually charged (though seldom erotic). One of my favorites in the collection, ‘After Coming’, cheerfully scuppers the notion of “post nut clarity” and replaces it with a beguiling post orgasmic mania- one in which the poet is able to extract validation from her partner. It is a striking piece that explores the sometimes transactional nature of relationships.
‘Eros is bad’ ruminates on falling in love. Is it a happy accident like Alice floating downward or does it require more deliberate intention like Orpheus descending into the underworld?
Medea, Aphrodite, and Prometheus all receive mentions and lend their mythological symbolism to the poetry. Yet, despite this occasional broadside from the western cannon the poems feel contemporary, experimental and suffused with vivid but oblique imagery. A skillful poet, Ariana Reines, has transformed the barren underworld into a fertile womb from whence chimeric (and thirsty) poetry springs forth.
May 14, 2025
never disappointed by ariana reines. my only regret is now i have to wait for the next book to come out 😪
December 14, 2025
ariana reines is the goat. that’s all. fav poems were probably theory of the flower, eye of death (that i originally read in harper’s) and the one where she talks about UTIs… i don’t remember what the word magnanimous means but i feel like it applies here
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June 27, 2025Spectacular, as always.
Read
April 9, 2025not my fav of hers but hard to not enjoy spending time in her voice. i think i end up a little not as into her more mystic voice as opposed to her more stein-inflected earlier work … but i’ve got a lot more to learn
Read
August 8, 2025"If you fail to build in yourself a secret
Room the culture will simply
Conduct its cargo & traffic up
& down you: you'll begin
To feel like an airport
Commending their
Product efficiently from mouth
To gate. Host body. Interrogation"
Room the culture will simply
Conduct its cargo & traffic up
& down you: you'll begin
To feel like an airport
Commending their
Product efficiently from mouth
To gate. Host body. Interrogation"
Read
November 25, 2025Poems great but also reminiscing about when Ariana signed my copy and we chatted about Barbie in the Nutcracker <3
Read
April 15, 2025Hard to distinguish whether I need a breather from Ariana’s work to become infatuated with it again, or whether I wanted a book that surpassed A Sand Book, a colossal work of career-defining proportions. Either way it’s excellent, but it didn’t mystify me.
August 15, 2025
- theory of the flower fucking amazing and worth studying again for theme and also for pacing and voluptuousness
- I really enjoyed the Greek mythology woven throughout and themes of philosophy, especially when ruminating on suffering and trauma. Done well
- I really enjoyed the Greek mythology woven throughout and themes of philosophy, especially when ruminating on suffering and trauma. Done well
June 14, 2025
WRITTEN CONCURRENTLY WITH Wave of Blood, perhaps? The Rose is mentioned a time or two in Wave of Blood, so perhaps it was already finished by October 2023, even though it appeared after Wave of Blood had already been out a few months. If conceived concurrently, they would be fraternal rather than identical twins--a lot in common, but easily told apart.
Reading The Rose reminded me a lot of reading Reines's other collection of poetry--not so much because she revisits material she has written of before (although, yes, she does) as because it conjures that same headlong feeling, that feeling that you had better not stop reading, that there is no way off this roller coaster until it comes to its end. That, and the feeling that you are playing a game of chess with Reines, but she has already finished the game in her head and has already started playing the next game while you are still trying to figure out her moves in this one.
So: familiar material? Yes, in that Reines again writes of her mother and again embraces abjection...that is, somehow, Reines turns being treated badly into a kind of agency, an assertiveness, a claim to power...ehh, that doesn't make any sense. But if it made sense, why would she write about it?
If our fathers
& mothers loved us right
Would we need to write
At all? If we were more tele-
Pathic as a species
Which we should have
Become by now, let's
Be honest, what would
Become of writing & art
But explosions in the heart
Mansions of great intricacy
We'd create invariably & constantly
On behalf of one another
With no need of a culture
To transact these things
For us?
Part I seems to come out of the aftermath of a difficult love affair, while Part II seems to be written during the affair, creating the odd feeling that that the difficult affair has already been lived through before it has been experienced. And then Part III is a long poem, "Theory of the Flower," which starts with Molly Bloom (if you have not heard Siobhan McKenna's reading of Molly's soliloquy, you should find it just to hear her say "swimming in roses") and pinballs through Joni Mitchell, Cynthia Nixon, Ezra Pound, and the Roman de la Rose before, in its last four pages...turning into...something utterly...different...and pivoting back to Joyce, only not exactly. Whew. Maybe the best thing she has ever done.
I have often thought of Reines as a contemporary confessional poet, and I still do, but I am grateful for the clear line she draws on p. 107:
& long ago I made a solemn vow not to go
The way the Confessionals went.
I just don't see my death bringing Justice.
Reading The Rose reminded me a lot of reading Reines's other collection of poetry--not so much because she revisits material she has written of before (although, yes, she does) as because it conjures that same headlong feeling, that feeling that you had better not stop reading, that there is no way off this roller coaster until it comes to its end. That, and the feeling that you are playing a game of chess with Reines, but she has already finished the game in her head and has already started playing the next game while you are still trying to figure out her moves in this one.
So: familiar material? Yes, in that Reines again writes of her mother and again embraces abjection...that is, somehow, Reines turns being treated badly into a kind of agency, an assertiveness, a claim to power...ehh, that doesn't make any sense. But if it made sense, why would she write about it?
If our fathers
& mothers loved us right
Would we need to write
At all? If we were more tele-
Pathic as a species
Which we should have
Become by now, let's
Be honest, what would
Become of writing & art
But explosions in the heart
Mansions of great intricacy
We'd create invariably & constantly
On behalf of one another
With no need of a culture
To transact these things
For us?
Part I seems to come out of the aftermath of a difficult love affair, while Part II seems to be written during the affair, creating the odd feeling that that the difficult affair has already been lived through before it has been experienced. And then Part III is a long poem, "Theory of the Flower," which starts with Molly Bloom (if you have not heard Siobhan McKenna's reading of Molly's soliloquy, you should find it just to hear her say "swimming in roses") and pinballs through Joni Mitchell, Cynthia Nixon, Ezra Pound, and the Roman de la Rose before, in its last four pages...turning into...something utterly...different...and pivoting back to Joyce, only not exactly. Whew. Maybe the best thing she has ever done.
I have often thought of Reines as a contemporary confessional poet, and I still do, but I am grateful for the clear line she draws on p. 107:
& long ago I made a solemn vow not to go
The way the Confessionals went.
I just don't see my death bringing Justice.
March 31, 2025
Thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for the ARC!
Ariana Reines’s The Rose is a collection of love(?) poems that would reward analysis more than reading.
The book has an interesting premise—essentially, how does one reconcile the idea of love with the reality of power? Is this power inherently problematic, or is it simply just the way life is?
In one early poem, we read about how the speaker suppresses their desire to be hurt out because of the cultural emphasis on self-respect. Poems later, we see this sentiment inverted with the admission that the speaker's masochism is simply misplaced boredom in light of the evil in the world.
This kind of nuanced vulnerability is rewarding, and I wish it were more prominent throughout the book. While moments like this recur, they are buried deep in the kind of esoteric poetry that feels designed for analysis in graduate seminars. It's mechanical and mathematical. Frankly, the form feels largely incongruous with the collection’s themes, but I think this tension may have felt productive in a chapbook with a tighter edit.
The Rose has an author blurb from Jenny Zhang, and readers of My Baby First Birthday may recognize a kinship between the gross-out crassness of that book and this one. Unfortunately, where Zhang demonstrates precision in her perversity, the voice at work here feels generally unfocused, the volume so constantly elevated that it loses all dimension.
As a final note, and one that is entirely personal yet perhaps relevant for interested readers, The Rose is just not the kind of poetry that sits well in this sociopolitical climate. Violent sex and jouissance through masc-coded language don’t feel transgressive or satirical when every political act in the headlines seems to celebrate male-driven violence. It’s not the poet’s fault that the collection would have landed differently if it were released six months earlier, but for readers who feel fatigued by the world, this collection may be one to avoid for a while.
Ariana Reines’s The Rose is a collection of love(?) poems that would reward analysis more than reading.
The book has an interesting premise—essentially, how does one reconcile the idea of love with the reality of power? Is this power inherently problematic, or is it simply just the way life is?
In one early poem, we read about how the speaker suppresses their desire to be hurt out because of the cultural emphasis on self-respect. Poems later, we see this sentiment inverted with the admission that the speaker's masochism is simply misplaced boredom in light of the evil in the world.
This kind of nuanced vulnerability is rewarding, and I wish it were more prominent throughout the book. While moments like this recur, they are buried deep in the kind of esoteric poetry that feels designed for analysis in graduate seminars. It's mechanical and mathematical. Frankly, the form feels largely incongruous with the collection’s themes, but I think this tension may have felt productive in a chapbook with a tighter edit.
The Rose has an author blurb from Jenny Zhang, and readers of My Baby First Birthday may recognize a kinship between the gross-out crassness of that book and this one. Unfortunately, where Zhang demonstrates precision in her perversity, the voice at work here feels generally unfocused, the volume so constantly elevated that it loses all dimension.
As a final note, and one that is entirely personal yet perhaps relevant for interested readers, The Rose is just not the kind of poetry that sits well in this sociopolitical climate. Violent sex and jouissance through masc-coded language don’t feel transgressive or satirical when every political act in the headlines seems to celebrate male-driven violence. It’s not the poet’s fault that the collection would have landed differently if it were released six months earlier, but for readers who feel fatigued by the world, this collection may be one to avoid for a while.
February 12, 2025
ARC given by NetGalley for Honest Review
3.5 stars rounded up
I went back and forth with "The Rose." Reines is a talented writer and this collection is reflective, playful, and unabashedly unafraid to pull punches. Some poems left me with irritation, finding the subject of the "man hating woman" to be overplayed. Other poems took me on a journey of self-reflection through gender ideology, sensuality, and grief. It's a hard book to pin down. There's a lot I liked, for example: Reines look at the role of society as it interacts through sex and romance to keep us apart or bring us together is poignant and refreshing. On the other hand, portions of the collection rely on the misandry/misogyny of broken relationships and that (while it's definitely satire) may go over heads.
Overall, I'd recommend this for poetry lovers looking for a new perspective in the themes of romance and relationships, especially when tied to societal pressures and norms.
My favorite poems are: "Divinity School", "Bitch", and "The Hanged Man."
3.5 stars rounded up
I went back and forth with "The Rose." Reines is a talented writer and this collection is reflective, playful, and unabashedly unafraid to pull punches. Some poems left me with irritation, finding the subject of the "man hating woman" to be overplayed. Other poems took me on a journey of self-reflection through gender ideology, sensuality, and grief. It's a hard book to pin down. There's a lot I liked, for example: Reines look at the role of society as it interacts through sex and romance to keep us apart or bring us together is poignant and refreshing. On the other hand, portions of the collection rely on the misandry/misogyny of broken relationships and that (while it's definitely satire) may go over heads.
Overall, I'd recommend this for poetry lovers looking for a new perspective in the themes of romance and relationships, especially when tied to societal pressures and norms.
My favorite poems are: "Divinity School", "Bitch", and "The Hanged Man."
November 24, 2025
Such an innocent-looking cover for such shocking content, but a poet must resort to whatever means necessary to express her truth, consciously ruining her life to revirginate her soul. That kind of poetry—though not quite in full control of the conceit.
Recurrent dreams
Of defective dolls kept coming back
To warn me. You are not a thing.
You are not the object against which forces
Tilt that you cannot control.
You are the entire subject of the world.
—from “The Economy,” p. 66
What if the universe appears so vast
Because the real proportions of our unconscious
Suffering & reperpetuated evil take up exactly that much
Space? & Voltaire was right? This really is the best
Of all possible worlds?
—from “Telescope,” p. 74
Favorite Poems:
“Being of the future”
“I feel like a bag of pork”
“Medea”
“2003”
“Bitch”
“Archilochus”
“The Hanged Man”
“The Economy”
“Jack & Joe”
“Telescope”
“Correction”
“Theory of the Flower”
Recurrent dreams
Of defective dolls kept coming back
To warn me. You are not a thing.
You are not the object against which forces
Tilt that you cannot control.
You are the entire subject of the world.
—from “The Economy,” p. 66
What if the universe appears so vast
Because the real proportions of our unconscious
Suffering & reperpetuated evil take up exactly that much
Space? & Voltaire was right? This really is the best
Of all possible worlds?
—from “Telescope,” p. 74
Favorite Poems:
“Being of the future”
“I feel like a bag of pork”
“Medea”
“2003”
“Bitch”
“Archilochus”
“The Hanged Man”
“The Economy”
“Jack & Joe”
“Telescope”
“Correction”
“Theory of the Flower”
Read
May 20, 2025“It may be that I suffer because I use men as muses & because the thought of my muse’s stupidity excites me. It means even naked with them I can protect my privacy. But such men are privileged because I give them *my* stupidity. I preserve my stupidity for them, & I fuck then like a mindless animal” (12)
“I couldn’t stop/ Bleeding & half my hair fell out” (18)
“I want to vomit, die, & change my life in that exact order” (23)
“I have always liked helpless/ & terrible men because they break my mind” (27)
“The secret/ & terrible shovelings/ Of love” (32)
“I couldn’t stop/ Bleeding & half my hair fell out” (18)
“I want to vomit, die, & change my life in that exact order” (23)
“I have always liked helpless/ & terrible men because they break my mind” (27)
“The secret/ & terrible shovelings/ Of love” (32)
June 24, 2025
Some real gems in this book. I adored "Statement of Fact" and "Jack & Joe", but felt that a lot of these poems washed away as I was reading them. The metaphors and imagery of the 'feminine' felt cliche, and the poems didn't interrogate something new, and as a result, I felt a bit disengaged.
I would never compare this book to that of some substack-essayist who just regurgitates cultural commentary that has been milked to death, but some of these poems looked very similar if you took your glasses off.
I would never compare this book to that of some substack-essayist who just regurgitates cultural commentary that has been milked to death, but some of these poems looked very similar if you took your glasses off.
Read
October 29, 2025two short and great poems (Bitch / The Rose) right next to each other. (“Bitch this is nature / shake your book at someone else”) (exactly)
as a collection though this didn’t really land for me, less rangy than Wave of Blood, and certainly less perverted/transgressive than intended. bordering on trite in places. the line “…disdain gripped my clit at his febrile display of need”, hilarious
rereading the blurb and chris kraus calls it Thrilling and Harrowing. when did you last read something truly harrowing, was it a poem riffing greek mythology
as a collection though this didn’t really land for me, less rangy than Wave of Blood, and certainly less perverted/transgressive than intended. bordering on trite in places. the line “…disdain gripped my clit at his febrile display of need”, hilarious
rereading the blurb and chris kraus calls it Thrilling and Harrowing. when did you last read something truly harrowing, was it a poem riffing greek mythology
April 22, 2025
hdp 😭 creo era mi last straw con ariana… hay una línea muy tenue entre escribir poesía del siglo xxi y escribir pura mamada…. con versos como “i miss you, he whispers, & disdain grips my clit at his febrile display of need” o “a woman / must have everything, sang joni / mitchell, whose records are finally / back on spotify”, creo es EVIDENTE de qué lado estamos…
March 27, 2025
Thanks to Goodreads for the giveaway!
The poems in this book are well written but I think it’s just too academic for me
The poems in this book are well written but I think it’s just too academic for me
Read
April 15, 2025<3 u Ariana… more thoughtful review to come shortly
May 5, 2025
Wow wow wow
May 25, 2025
These poems are so dark but so real and raw. Why do I keep going to reads that make me cry and feel so much (no I will not be changing that anytime soon).
June 9, 2025
A beautiful collection of poems. Not something I would typically pick up, but this has broadened my horizons.
July 27, 2025
I just love everything she writes
August 29, 2025
find the subtext of her obsession w menstruation/the womb/womanhood transphobic and this book less exciting than a sandbook
September 11, 2025
I just didn’t understand it. If I could give this book 0 stars I would.
September 12, 2025
the aspects of WAVE OF BLOOD i found repetitive or otherwise dull are completely absent here. THE ROSE, like the best literature and the best fucks, sparked me up and down from the brain to the toes.
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October 19, 2025first ariana reines book and i loooved it. energized me to read poetry again, excited to read more of her
December 8, 2025
These poems have claws, thorns;
taste your own blood as it drips
once again, you’ve opened your lips
Yes it’s painful
but also
delicious
taste your own blood as it drips
once again, you’ve opened your lips
Yes it’s painful
but also
delicious
September 11, 2025
8 - very vulnerable work. Last poem was beautifully introspective and wrapped the entire piece together perfectly
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews