The Rose: Poems

by Ariana Reines

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.

Genres: Poetry

135 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 15, 2025

About the author

Ariana 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.

Reviews

[Kevin Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Christina Mainelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

never disappointed by ariana reines. my only regret is now i have to wait for the next book to come out 😪

[Meghan Molnar · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Farren]

Spectacular, as always.

[Bradley Willow]

not 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

[Fake world experience]

"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"

[Clara]

Poems great but also reminiscing about when Ariana signed my copy and we chatted about Barbie in the Nutcracker <3

[Emily Wood]

Hard 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.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being of the future
Being of the future
With all the plastic you'll know is in me
& all the rays
From other worlds
Streaming through my hair
I want you to know I too sometimes feel
An unnatural feeling
Electric
Humming in my head & inner ear
Nearly metallic
Like the static when you put on
What used to be called
A synthetic
Shirt (7)

2003
There wasn't enough room
On my face. Sorrow stretched
From bone to bone. My hips were grim
& held their protest like a shoebox
Full of photographs from the war
I couldn't stop
Bleeding & half my hair fell out
How could I have let this happen?
I let my country go to war
I let my mother lose her mind
Brother too. I let my country go.
So much power
& no idea how to use it (18)

Medicine
Winged seeds flying everywhere
The trees smell like semen
The caduceus has nothing
To do with healing
Said Conrad
It has bite marks at the end of it
From the dead trying to claw
Their way back to the living
I have always liked helpless
& terrible men because they break my mind
I see my brains lolling open
Like the fleshes of oysters
& crabs ripped from the shell
Aphrodite surrounded by shells, flying
From the sea to heaven (27)

Hellmouth
I lost my mother on the surface
Of the Earth. I lost her in public.
Never agreed to what
We've been doing with Nature
Of which I am a part. After pulling
Flowers I had nightmares
Rusted trowels & spades
In radial formation
Each displaying a single human organ
As if dug up.
As if an offering.
I crush my "need for self-
Expression" all the time
Even though it's my profession
Do human bodies come
From underground as the ancients
Thought snakes did? I compress
My thoughts: the bodies of serpents
Under the amorous bulk of a mountain.
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
Devolving into X-ray. I see through
Everything passing by way
Of me. Mouth
Of the city. Lip
Of the country. Making
Improvements on the danger
In me: revising the charter
I drafted to kill with
I got so angry
I could no longer eat.
My charter governed
Only me. Grenades
& pomegranates
Growing underground.
There is a secret culture
Underground, whose womb
Foments visions
Here lie
Also the black
Hole & the solar
Neutrino. The secret
& terrible shovelings
Of love. Loading my chasm
With myth & gunpowder
Tamping it all down
With a stick. When you're
A revolutionary soldier
With only one bullet
What else can you do?
In this economy myth
Costs less than a bullet
Hardly anyone understands it
Anymore which's why
You can't really sell it.
They ruined the internet
For weeks we were looking
For Wild at Heart
Finally accepting what felt like our final
Night together it'd been scrubbed
From the ether
If you didn't already know it
How would you know
To seek it? Or the reality of fire
As even recent artists have shown it?
Ours was a love our phones
Made possible & tooketh
Away. Buying & selling
Our worst nightmare
To one another was a speedy
Intimacy—sheer drop
To the depths. Fabricating
Mutual dreams at the edges
Of our mouth—where
Grandparents who lose
Their native language hide
Their dreams. Like a stone
Phallus manufactured
For the hand of a devotee
Communicating cult drugs
To the core of me.
Where business also
Is transacted. For vision
Too is business. & so
Is love—like ours.
I seated myself in silence
Votary offering
To all of shrieking
Time. I found a quiet place
For my heart to harden
As it filled up with blood
I lost my mother. I rejected
Love. You belong
To Earth, spoke something
Inside me. The actual
Smell of fish. The powerful
Would have me forget my body.
The place of terror
Is a place of arousal
Where I would not build
Our house. Red tide.
River of burning
Shit. Convection of an empty
Feeling. Daniela described to me
The reverse tectonics on the sea
Floor pulling souls down
To the Earth's core she saw
In a vision. Souls
So furious this was their only
Way back to the maternal embrace.
We both cried when she said it:
You can't read things like this
In a book or say them in public.
The cool room at the center
Of my house, monster
Attracting me like no man.
I am so angry. I have gotten
So angry. The little
Room in the middle
Of me. Where I see
What I can't say. I have to stay
Moving, evade
The imperial calendar—
My father's beard whitening
& the blackening sockets
Of his eyes. I live in Time
Chasm of stars
Discipline of magnetism
In the navel of the labyrinth.
Horned monster. Potions
Of the eye. Attributes
I share with the spider
Light my way
It's better not to speak
Of such things
The girl in the story often
Doesn't even want a man
But they don't teach you that do they.
She wants a devil.
An animal. To escape
The raping god—to be a tree. The girl
Who pulled flowers to be sucked
Under—the girl who led the hero
Through the core of his ordeal
All heroes grow ashamed
Of the assistance they depend on
All sorceresses who once gave
So freely of their wisdom
Will live to meet the day at last—
Because no witch dies
She finally wants her magic for herself.
When Vesuvius erupted no authority
Could divide punishment from climax
Blood's hot career
Behind white-blue
Marble death conceals a riot
Of misspent emotion. Harassment
Of silence, tissue
Of horrors. Explosions
On the surface of the sun.
Last night the sky was electric
I wouldn't let my lover get near me
Even though I yearned for him
Coronal mass ejection
Contradiction. How else
Could I open my mouth?
But you can write without speaking.
But do it too much you'll lose
Your womanhood.
When I turned 5
My mother hired a pony
I was so overwhelmed
By surprise at the sight of it
That I refused to ride it.
Everybody rode that animal
But me. I watched them all
Go up & down our yard
Surprise led to a force of will
I still don't understand. The larger the lust
The more erotic its refusal.
What is "no"? Not the withdrawal
Of consent—at its secret, esoteric
Best. No meant: I want a force
Of Nature. Nothing less.
My grandmother's words
Press against my navel
When I'm sleeping: Give me a child
She says. Tell your baby
My story. But the red
Priapic face of life
Offends me with its cheer
& sanity. All you have to do
Is say yes. Life smiles
Like a lurid frankness.
I would grow to a great size & piss
On this Earth till it drowns but I'm forced
To govern my territory
With absolute rationality
& so I do & so I shall
Til Nature itself overwhelms me
What I repress contributes to the force
Of what I show. Lust
Is dignified by ash for eternity
Revenge of the living planet: indissoluble
From generosity, the only
Feminine law. (30-41)

from Jack & Joe
I feel just. The heroine of nothing at all
Save the dead hours, the ones that leap
To their grave at the center of me
I can give all this up—
This kind of poetry (73)

Eye of Death
Me & Amanda went to see David
Blaine the night of the Scorpio

Eclipse. He held his breath
For over ten minutes in an orb

Of water. I remember
His daughter doing a dance

Then we walked soft thru the casino
BBLs & tiny dresses, the lull of slots

& AC—there’s a feeling of safety in there you know &
A powerful idea America hates: that there’s dignity

In pleasure. Copious good quality intelligence spent
Working out the right way to make even me feel happy

Floating thru the crowd on the unnerving
Feats of David Blaine

We found our bodies drawn
Toward an almost serpentine

Cerebral energy—you could feel it yards
Away—before you saw them—a table of men

Poring over their cards like nuclear
Physicists on deadline—

Strange electric brain
Power physically stimulating

The asp uncoiled from its tree
Inside me, drawing us from the pink

Lights of the money machines
To halogen-white intensity

When a man dressed impeccably in gray
Looked up from his cards & stared

At me—long & hard. A lock

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Of combed hair dropped
‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ Over his brow

He held my gaze
Till I couldn’t take it anymore

& dropped my eyes—
Amanda gripped my arm

Wait—were we already walking arm in arm?
She, the beautiful one, steadied me

Did that really just happen I said
It really did she said. Give me a second I need

To catch my breath I said, steering us
Cowardly just slightly out of the guy’s

Sightline. I think
I understand Dante now I said

& also Beatrice. Did you know Petrarch’s Laura
Was the great-grandmother of the Marquis

De Sade? This is the kind of conversation
I make when I’m stalling.

What if one look is all you get
Century to century?

Only one poker room in this whole giant casino
This the era of the starved polar

Bear & the skinny lion—predators
In a growing wasteland devoid of prey.

The most famous game—font of metaphor—
Relegated to the back of the hall & only a few

Tables & most of them empty
Gorgonic eye fucking with me

He shocked me back into the ancient
World. Saw me back

Into poetry (81-3)

from Wife
I did not in the end
Desire the poet as I thought I would
Watching him sink his enormous
& beautiful body into a jacuzzi, I loved him exactly
As long as I could, just a few minutes
Longer in the ancient realms of the broken
Hearted & the distorted
Where I have made my bed these ten
Thousand years. Where I no longer
Make my bed. My flight was delayed
By many hours but I had already committed
To being gone. I feel I will see you somewhere
Soon he said as we hugged goodbye. I will see
You in the Holy Land, I said. I will see you in Hell. (95-6)

from Theory of the Flower
I studied the winds
Of Oc—Occitanic—informally—

I studied them by having them
Blow on me.
[...]
There's only one
World & it is full of rhyme... (112)

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like reines excels in short form and her power gets a little muddied in long form poems. Luckily there were several shorter brilliances in this collection.

[Kristiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d never heard of Reines prior to this, and while at first I wasn’t too sure about the collection, by the end I really enjoyed her style. Reines is very much a contemporary feminist poet focusing on the body, sex, and femininity and how these converge in womanhood beneath the patriarchy.

[Stella · Rating 4 out of 5]

- 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

[Nick Gloaming · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems feel raw, visceral, accurate, exquisite, hypnotic, mystical, spiritual, sexual … an opening up, an adjusting of the lens. Her sharpest yet.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 4 out of 5]

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."

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

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”

[H]

“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)

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Loretta Riach]

two 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

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Who's the real addressee
Of literature? The soul itself?

What gave rise to the novel? Why
Romance the real?

Can the real
Be borne without it?

We're taught myth
Is false. Competing narratives

Are real. What pulled
Europe out of the dark ages

Might've been a turn
In the addressee

Of poetry. When it turned
Toward the woman--or even just complained

About her. When she
Complained to her lute . . .

I never read this idea anywhere.
Maybe I made it up."

(pg. 110)

[Emily]

The poems in The Rose stained my lips of berry and pressed an ear into a burrowing animals den. Modern and ancient references flitted through this collection of poems.

I found Reines work the used poetry section at community thrift it was her early aughts book called Cœur de Lion which ensnared me with its medieval font and slack jawed confessions.

The Rose is urgent and eternal in its etchings of frayed, tangled emotions. I will return to it.

[Lola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review
---
The Rose is an amazing collection of poetry that blooms and pricks at you just like an actual rose.
I feel like short form as opposed to long form poems work better for Reines, however, I did really enjoy this collection. I enjoyed the mythology themes that were woven beautifully into her poems.

I would love to read more of her work in the future!

[lia &#x1f429; · Rating 2 out of 5]

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…

[AOÇ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone was right, this was a really great read. Unexpected rhythms and feelings. Everything felt so raw and genuine. Reminded me that the best writing makes for a vulnerable reading. Helpful during times of heart pain, from all things. Feels almost pyrotechnic with her words. Can't wait to read more of Reines.

[Mary Daniels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an awesome book of poems, and I usually don’t like reading poetry. Her writing seems disjoined (like some poetry tends to be) but it all seamlessly flows together to create a patchwork quilt of ideas, thoughts; experiences, anecdotes, and metaphors.

[Tess · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just didn't like it.

There was also a random ableist slur thrown into the first handful of pages that genuinely caught me off guard. I didn't think we were still doing that so casually anymore and you'd like to think a poet would be able to find better words I guess

[Jami Moss · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks to Goodreads for the giveaway!

The poems in this book are well written but I think it’s just too academic for me

[Shawn Cremer]

<3 u Ariana… more thoughtful review to come shortly

[hazelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow wow wow