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A Sand Book: Poems
Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Longlisted for the National Book Award “Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention.” ―Diana Arterian, The New York Times A Sand Book is a poetry collection in twelve parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland to the massacre at Sandy Hook, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, from Attar's “Conference of the Birds” to Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” to Twitter, A Sand Book is about change and quantification, the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. It moves among houses of worship and grocery stores, flitters between geological upheaval and the weird weather of the Internet. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury , Reines has written her most ambitious work to date, but also her most visceral and satisfying.
320 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2019
93 people are currently reading
1653 people want to read
About the author
Ariana Reines
36 books403 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 78 reviews
November 3, 2019
Despite my appreciation for the word play and structure of the poems in this collection, I often found reading them a chore. I just couldn’t connect with much of what was here.
July 5, 2019
I think I may have read too much of Reines.
Last spring when I was in Cambridge I saw Ariana Reines of all people on the street in front of St Johns. She looked confused and was lingering at a crossing, and this was gauche of me but I went up to her and said something I have since fortunately forgotten. She asked where Corpus Christi was, I think, and I had to tell her I had no idea.
There is this girl I know from college -- I wouldn't call her a friend; she is one of those prickly women, and I never know where I stand with her, and I say all this of course as the highest of compliments -- and she is now Ariana Reines' assistant apparently, and she said she would get me an ARC of this book back in April, and now the book is out, and still no ARC, though I did ask a perhaps gauche amount of times, so I had to buy it, and now I guess I won't be messaging her again ever probably.
Also I took a creative writing class with a writer who said she sensed an affinity between my writing and that of Reines, and I was like well yeah thats because I'm a fangirl, and she offered to intro me, but then she forgot.
So, several near brushes over the past year.
Then a couple weeks ago I went to a book launch-cum-solstice celebration in Los Angeles advertised as "The Time of the Spectacle Will Pass: A conversation about psychedelics, futurist ecologies, and the poetics of mediumship." A talk between Reines and Bett Williams, who just published a memoir about growing magic mushrooms. So, of course, there was a lot of shrooms talk. Some stuff was said about needing to approach the shrooms devotionally. This is probably better than approaching them fratly as a party drug, but also more annoying to hear people talk about, so bottom line is it really better??
Reines read her poem in Mercury about the curtain of jerky and the command from on high to buy lots of cattle and cause them to graze freely. Then, and this was the interesting part for me, Reines connected this to the research on desertification which suggests that wandering cattle actually prevent desertification, because they shit and trample seeds everywhere. Which is how all this connects to the "sand" book.
And in another instance of odd closeness: in the room waiting for the solstice talk to begin, I sat and read a couple pages of Roberto Calasso's Ka, which is a book about Vedic mythology. The pages were describing a cloak that Prajapati teaches the gods to use to hide from death: the cloak is woven from all the equivalences that the mind sees in the world. These equivalences are immortal, where "I" am not, which is why "I" must learn them. Then during the event, Reines read from Mosaic, which she introduces as a revelation that was basically given unto/through her from on high -- the words are not her own, she says -- and one of the lines is "ANALOGY IS THE STRUCTURING PRINCIPLE OF THE UNIVERSE." It was uncanny to hear Reines just spouting aphoristically, with no citation or anything, this thing I had just read about from India's most ancient texts. Of course everyone has been saying this forever, it's not just Reines and the Vedas.
After the talk was over, I could have stayed to socialize with Reines and Williams and the twenty-odd attendees, but I didn't feel like it. Even as these random connections to her have accrued I wanted to keep distance.
Then when I started reading A Sand Book I felt uncomfortably close to it in some ways. I mean I had recently scribbled some stuff about rainbows and iridescence and peacocks, so I was kind of freaked out to see that emerge as a consistent theme throughout these poems. Also, I recently scribbled something about glottal stops, and what shows up several times in a poem? Glottal stops.
Reading too much into all this?
Mosaic also has: "MERCURY ALSO TEACHES 'I WANT TO BE LIKE' AND THE RISKS THAT GO WITH 'I WANT TO BE LIKE' TO TEACH US ABOUT THE PRINCIPLE OF LIKENESS THAT GOVERNS THE UNIVERSE."
Mercury, the god of messages and communication, of reading. To read something you have to become like it in some way. The risk of reading.
In the crowd at the solstice thing I saw so many frizzy-haired beglassed Hermione types like me who nodded emphatically at appropriate points and have clearly all assimilated into the Reines hivethink.
I think I may have read too much of Reines.
Last spring when I was in Cambridge I saw Ariana Reines of all people on the street in front of St Johns. She looked confused and was lingering at a crossing, and this was gauche of me but I went up to her and said something I have since fortunately forgotten. She asked where Corpus Christi was, I think, and I had to tell her I had no idea.
There is this girl I know from college -- I wouldn't call her a friend; she is one of those prickly women, and I never know where I stand with her, and I say all this of course as the highest of compliments -- and she is now Ariana Reines' assistant apparently, and she said she would get me an ARC of this book back in April, and now the book is out, and still no ARC, though I did ask a perhaps gauche amount of times, so I had to buy it, and now I guess I won't be messaging her again ever probably.
Also I took a creative writing class with a writer who said she sensed an affinity between my writing and that of Reines, and I was like well yeah thats because I'm a fangirl, and she offered to intro me, but then she forgot.
So, several near brushes over the past year.
Then a couple weeks ago I went to a book launch-cum-solstice celebration in Los Angeles advertised as "The Time of the Spectacle Will Pass: A conversation about psychedelics, futurist ecologies, and the poetics of mediumship." A talk between Reines and Bett Williams, who just published a memoir about growing magic mushrooms. So, of course, there was a lot of shrooms talk. Some stuff was said about needing to approach the shrooms devotionally. This is probably better than approaching them fratly as a party drug, but also more annoying to hear people talk about, so bottom line is it really better??
Reines read her poem in Mercury about the curtain of jerky and the command from on high to buy lots of cattle and cause them to graze freely. Then, and this was the interesting part for me, Reines connected this to the research on desertification which suggests that wandering cattle actually prevent desertification, because they shit and trample seeds everywhere. Which is how all this connects to the "sand" book.
And in another instance of odd closeness: in the room waiting for the solstice talk to begin, I sat and read a couple pages of Roberto Calasso's Ka, which is a book about Vedic mythology. The pages were describing a cloak that Prajapati teaches the gods to use to hide from death: the cloak is woven from all the equivalences that the mind sees in the world. These equivalences are immortal, where "I" am not, which is why "I" must learn them. Then during the event, Reines read from Mosaic, which she introduces as a revelation that was basically given unto/through her from on high -- the words are not her own, she says -- and one of the lines is "ANALOGY IS THE STRUCTURING PRINCIPLE OF THE UNIVERSE." It was uncanny to hear Reines just spouting aphoristically, with no citation or anything, this thing I had just read about from India's most ancient texts. Of course everyone has been saying this forever, it's not just Reines and the Vedas.
After the talk was over, I could have stayed to socialize with Reines and Williams and the twenty-odd attendees, but I didn't feel like it. Even as these random connections to her have accrued I wanted to keep distance.
Then when I started reading A Sand Book I felt uncomfortably close to it in some ways. I mean I had recently scribbled some stuff about rainbows and iridescence and peacocks, so I was kind of freaked out to see that emerge as a consistent theme throughout these poems. Also, I recently scribbled something about glottal stops, and what shows up several times in a poem? Glottal stops.
Reading too much into all this?
Mosaic also has: "MERCURY ALSO TEACHES 'I WANT TO BE LIKE' AND THE RISKS THAT GO WITH 'I WANT TO BE LIKE' TO TEACH US ABOUT THE PRINCIPLE OF LIKENESS THAT GOVERNS THE UNIVERSE."
Mercury, the god of messages and communication, of reading. To read something you have to become like it in some way. The risk of reading.
In the crowd at the solstice thing I saw so many frizzy-haired beglassed Hermione types like me who nodded emphatically at appropriate points and have clearly all assimilated into the Reines hivethink.
I think I may have read too much of Reines.
July 29, 2019
checked this out from the library but i will have to buy it. a book of excess. when i carry this book around, i am carrying heavy sediment and it fills. such a wild thing to have heard ariana read the last essay out loud at university of chicago last spring, and the final dark parts were all a powerpoint we read in silence in the audience. and then i grabbed a sprite in my tote bag and loitered in the back of the room of the academia-library for awhile, before riding the bus home up thru the south side. this book feels like real life feels like. there is an overwhelming throb of "technology as divine" and voices are covered in water. a girl is twerking the sunset. a poem is "sent from my iphone." then spun into an undefinable ancient longing, a researched biblical thing, a hollow fuck. nothing is edited out. this book is almost 400 pages long. can't stop reading it. i'm still reading it. just said "wow wow wow." scratched my fingers through my scalp and smeared them thru the black pages of this book in greasy tracks on accident. "they taught us the world / was ending but they were wrong / they hardly taught us anything"
September 12, 2020
3.5 stars
I have neither the time nor the heart right now to leave a full review but there is much here that is vivid, beautiful, and true; there's also a lot that is tiresome, repetitive, jejune, and boring. I think the former outweighs the latter by a bit, particularly in the longer poems, but your mileage may vary.
I have neither the time nor the heart right now to leave a full review but there is much here that is vivid, beautiful, and true; there's also a lot that is tiresome, repetitive, jejune, and boring. I think the former outweighs the latter by a bit, particularly in the longer poems, but your mileage may vary.
June 26, 2019
My review is here: https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/06/...
September 15, 2019
“day of mourning from hurricane
sandy to sandy
hook stand of trees
in the form of china
the great sand fire of 2016
hot wind over the water at big sur”
“THERE IS NOTHING A PERSON CANNOT LOVE”
sandy to sandy
hook stand of trees
in the form of china
the great sand fire of 2016
hot wind over the water at big sur”
“THERE IS NOTHING A PERSON CANNOT LOVE”
January 27, 2021
This really felt way too long at some points but I’m glad I stuck with it especially because of the MOSAIC section at the end. Often hard to focus on at times and gave me an overwhelming feeling of wanting to”look away” .... Some really beautiful and complex pieces in here.
Read
May 1, 2021Can everything / Be made to resolve into my originary pain?
When this was good, this was really good. I loved the fleeting glimpses of the sacred. There is a sense of cosmic wonder here, but because the book is so excessive, it feels buried beneath the excessive sediment/sentiments of everyday life and hyperconnected global capitalism. This structure might have been intentional, for how else can a book about sand, about the universe, gesture to anything less than its expansiveness? Still, I can't ignore the fact of there being at least 100 pages worth of ok poems. The essential poems for me were the first 'Arena' section, 'A Partial History of Iridescence', and the first few poems in 'Safeway', while the final two poems 'Pilgrim's Progress' and 'Open Fifths' left me breathless.
Worlds whipping themselves slowly into a cream
She left her broken beaded necklace scattered where it fell
'I'm paid a toll by every star inside this constellation'
Humid Alberti bass of allergens & other dander
Dusting haughtily the unchurned Milky Way
Moving unconsciously through this
Apparently open system... The colour
of neutrality, dignity's gender
The babysmooth cheek of specie
But I don't feel it's my job to resolve these things for you
When this was good, this was really good. I loved the fleeting glimpses of the sacred. There is a sense of cosmic wonder here, but because the book is so excessive, it feels buried beneath the excessive sediment/sentiments of everyday life and hyperconnected global capitalism. This structure might have been intentional, for how else can a book about sand, about the universe, gesture to anything less than its expansiveness? Still, I can't ignore the fact of there being at least 100 pages worth of ok poems. The essential poems for me were the first 'Arena' section, 'A Partial History of Iridescence', and the first few poems in 'Safeway', while the final two poems 'Pilgrim's Progress' and 'Open Fifths' left me breathless.
Worlds whipping themselves slowly into a cream
She left her broken beaded necklace scattered where it fell
'I'm paid a toll by every star inside this constellation'
Humid Alberti bass of allergens & other dander
Dusting haughtily the unchurned Milky Way
Moving unconsciously through this
Apparently open system... The colour
of neutrality, dignity's gender
The babysmooth cheek of specie
But I don't feel it's my job to resolve these things for you
March 31, 2021
Brilliant.
January 12, 2020
A Sand Book was one of the most beautiful journeys I went on in 2019; pls don’t miss it. I don’t describe many books as "journeys" but that’s what A Sand Book was to me. Reines is like a spirit guide for the desertification of the soul and society. My words can’t do it justice. Everything is so chaotic now, but at least there’s beautiful words still to be had.
P.S. Read it at night 🕯
P.S. Read it at night 🕯
July 19, 2019
Amazing. I’m going to write more about this on my reading blog but this book is to this year what Call Me Zebra was last year (it saved me). It saved me and it’s going to go on saving me. Reading this book also really busted me out of being a notebook artist and got me writing verse again.
October 29, 2019
This is probably the worst book i've read this year - everyone else seems to love it though so don't take my word for it! I will say this book got a little better for me at the end but I wouldn't recommend
January 11, 2020
Well, it's poetry, and even if you studied literature, and read poetry on the regular (& even writecherown), reading poetry requires close attention, rereading, and I think it helps to know something of the poet. I'm not familiar with this poet. I've seen her name. I missed her reading here a few years ago. Now, I regret it. This book incited noise, so I had to check it out.
I can't give this less than four stars, cuz some of it amazed me. And also because Ariana Reines has impressive credentials, so I gotta recognize. Tho a part of me is inclined to give it three stars. Just cuz so often I was lost, and there are cultural references I am not familiar with. (I stopped to look things up, so I could get a better grasp, or at least some sense of what the hell.)
I don't know if it's me, or the poet(ry). Some of the pop culture references lowered their value, for me personally. Cuz, like, well, I can't dig that sh.t. Beyonce? Really? Plz.
This poet offers astrology readings. She has a website. I'm not sure what to make of that. That a hustle? I don't not believe in cosmic power. To a point. I think it can affect us, just cuz everything is energy, energy, energy. But does a reading mean anything, other than what you want it to? I mean, does this stuff work through the power of suggestion? IDK. It's fun and interesting, though. And the gullible, the troubled, the desperate, the curious will part with their ducats. No disrespect. Would that I could. I mean, bring in bread like that, not part with it.
Reines is a poet, though. That I can see. I'll have to read more of her work. At this point, I feel a certain ambivalence. I mean, not sure if I like her writing. Personally.
I can't give this less than four stars, cuz some of it amazed me. And also because Ariana Reines has impressive credentials, so I gotta recognize. Tho a part of me is inclined to give it three stars. Just cuz so often I was lost, and there are cultural references I am not familiar with. (I stopped to look things up, so I could get a better grasp, or at least some sense of what the hell.)
I don't know if it's me, or the poet(ry). Some of the pop culture references lowered their value, for me personally. Cuz, like, well, I can't dig that sh.t. Beyonce? Really? Plz.
This poet offers astrology readings. She has a website. I'm not sure what to make of that. That a hustle? I don't not believe in cosmic power. To a point. I think it can affect us, just cuz everything is energy, energy, energy. But does a reading mean anything, other than what you want it to? I mean, does this stuff work through the power of suggestion? IDK. It's fun and interesting, though. And the gullible, the troubled, the desperate, the curious will part with their ducats. No disrespect. Would that I could. I mean, bring in bread like that, not part with it.
Reines is a poet, though. That I can see. I'll have to read more of her work. At this point, I feel a certain ambivalence. I mean, not sure if I like her writing. Personally.
December 21, 2021
A psychoactive transmission potent enough to wiggle even my antennae, insensitive as they are to this sort of high high affective abstraction. If I'm being honest, I'd like nothing more than to be bounced around in Ariana Reines's skull cavity like a fetal human pinball, but this is decent consolation.
January 22, 2020
Ariana Reines has a gift arresting word play and engaging in alienation in ways that can exist in a liminal space between humor and discomfort. Her wordplay entices but often the subject matter or the perspective pushes one away at once. That makes these poems difficult but not in either visceral way or in a the way of puzzle. IT is their liminality and unease that washes over you.
Read
December 31, 2019The blurb is more coherent about this collection than I can be. These poems often feel raw and excessive (deliberately). Not really my thing but I admired them.
November 20, 2020
Ariana - she is a queen!
May 30, 2023
SHES SO GOOD
July 6, 2022
While some of these poems were impenetrable, most left me so deeply immersed I lost track of time. Cosmic is a good descriptor of Reines' style. Reines gifts the reader a freedom to connect and imagine a new sort of sacredness in her intimate life, and to that end, a righteous disgust in contemporary living.
Read
November 30, 2023Fierce, urgent, and raw. A poetry collection that faces natural, unnatural, and personal disaster. There is hope and victory, anger and relief. And love too.
September 30, 2022
I don’t “get” every poem here but there are some poems here that reconfigure my soul while I am reading them and make me feel that if I can just stay here in this poem forever I will be OK.
I know I will keep coming back to this forever.
I know I will keep coming back to this forever.
March 16, 2021
I am not one of the people who loved this book. I also didn’t not like it. There were some really beautiful poems that really resonated with me and some that really puzzled me. But i was really intrigued by the last section of the book, entitled Mosaic. Just a really freaking cool account of a mystical experience that I appreciate Arienna sharing
March 17, 2021
Everything is here. It's real.
An interesting read and one I will come back to.
An interesting read and one I will come back to.
January 12, 2021
I'm not so good with poetry, but basically I thought this was gems amongst a forest of stinkers. Didn't make it all the way through. "A Partial History" is my favorite but it's on page 5!
October 12, 2019
Raw. And that ending, this is the first Ariana Reines book I have read and throughout I thought could it be? And in the end I find to that she hears the voice I hear. I have felt what she felt. She writes the experience and feeling and the type of things the voice says in a great way! If anyone else would like to know about the voice, idk possibly God or one of them, I recommend the next God by Eva Ravenwood.
November 10, 2019
This book blew my mind and introduced me to a poet who I want to read more from. I won't claim to understand everything Ariana Reines is trying to say in this set of poems. But my interpretation is that she is lamenting the spiritual desert of our culture and our lives. In today's internet-driven, smartphone-focused lives, she writes of the "dominant Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing" and says:
There is imagery of sand and deserts throughout this book as she writes poems that relate to climate change, school shootings, her internet addiction, her love life, her spirituality, and more. The language is both intimate and full of life, at times frenetic. I found it to be a fascinating read that drew me in to the point that I read it twice to get a better sense of what she is trying to communicate.
This book ends with a chapter called "Mosaic" that relates a spiritual encounter Ariana had with a personality of overwhelming love. During this encounter, "He/It" communicated ideas to her that she wrote down in her notebook. But she says that "the words that I wrote down are like one edge, one bevel, a single facet of a multidimensional communique, around which all details and nuances, all consequent thoughts and realities, spread in every dimension of space and time." Given that this encounter predates many of the poems in this book, I wonder if "A Sand Book" is really Ariana's reaction to this encounter. After an experience of rapture like this, perhaps the world does feel like a desert in comparison. The fact that she saves "Mosaic" for the last chapter of this book suggests to me a hopefulness. Even though our world and our lives are often dry and lifeless like a desert, there is a love bigger than we can imagine that is available to us.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys and appreciates poetry.
Anyway it wasn't working. None of it was working.
. . .
We were lost in a language of images.
It was growing difficult to speak. Yet
talk was everywhere.
There is imagery of sand and deserts throughout this book as she writes poems that relate to climate change, school shootings, her internet addiction, her love life, her spirituality, and more. The language is both intimate and full of life, at times frenetic. I found it to be a fascinating read that drew me in to the point that I read it twice to get a better sense of what she is trying to communicate.
This book ends with a chapter called "Mosaic" that relates a spiritual encounter Ariana had with a personality of overwhelming love. During this encounter, "He/It" communicated ideas to her that she wrote down in her notebook. But she says that "the words that I wrote down are like one edge, one bevel, a single facet of a multidimensional communique, around which all details and nuances, all consequent thoughts and realities, spread in every dimension of space and time." Given that this encounter predates many of the poems in this book, I wonder if "A Sand Book" is really Ariana's reaction to this encounter. After an experience of rapture like this, perhaps the world does feel like a desert in comparison. The fact that she saves "Mosaic" for the last chapter of this book suggests to me a hopefulness. Even though our world and our lives are often dry and lifeless like a desert, there is a love bigger than we can imagine that is available to us.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys and appreciates poetry.
October 8, 2023
A THICK poetry book - pretty abstract language. Very reflective on her own life, and the experiences she's had. Pulls in references to history and current events; personal events, and larger messaging about environmentalism and racism.
Great poems, however truthfully my favorite part of this book is the last section which is written in white text on black pages and tells the tale of a time she heard the voice of a some higher power and she shares the words it said to her - trippy, philosophical, reflective, good :)
*This book does discuss rape and sexual assault for anyone who finds that triggering
Great poems, however truthfully my favorite part of this book is the last section which is written in white text on black pages and tells the tale of a time she heard the voice of a some higher power and she shares the words it said to her - trippy, philosophical, reflective, good :)
*This book does discuss rape and sexual assault for anyone who finds that triggering
August 25, 2019
i loved the poems in “tiffany’s poems” and “mosaic” - many of the others fell a bit flat for me. but this is such a huge volume and feat!
January 12, 2022
A whopper of a poetry book. This book covers I think approximately 6 years of material from Ariana, and is much larger in scope than any of her previous volumes of poetry. Finishing this book means I'm all caught up with what Ariana has produced (as far as I know) and that is a really great feeling. Coeur de Leon really hit me hard when I was first becoming interested in poetry, and I continue to be in awe of Ariana's writing. I think A Sand Book is most similar to Mercury in tone. This book constitutes a series of chapbooks, some of which have been previously published on their own. The contents change from section to section, but do feel like they add up to something larger – an accumulation that tells a kind of narrative, or at least an impression of a period of life for one poet. I enjoyed being given such an expansive look into a poet's work for a period of time, that wasn't being presented as a retrospective or a selection but rather intended by the author to be presented this way. Worth reading cover to cover, and worth dipping back into favourite sections or poems over again.
Read
June 19, 2025…..in awe, a lot of the time I wanted to throw my book across the room, but I just gently set it in my lap and shook my head.
Struggled a lot with how to conceive of this book’s length, and I found this quote from an interview very helpful… Reines said: “There are so many ways I could have made this book smaller or isolated the glory and just delivered that and cut out all the shit, but that would go against my religion – whatever my religion really is. I’ve always been excited by the idea, artistically, ethically, spiritually, of expanding the frame of what we can report on, of what, in our existence, deserves attention. How do you integrate mystical experience into “normal life.” I don’t even know what normal life is anymore….That was a weird parabola of an answer. I don’t even remember the question. (laughter)”
Yes ok. What does that mean for a book and how a “book” “reads”? I don’t know. But I don’t think that Reines cares, and actually I don’t either, and in fact I like that this book troubles my conception of how long a book of poems “should” be and why. And so why? What makes a poem special? Is it its isolation? Are poems lonely? Are good poems lonelier?
Struggled a lot with how to conceive of this book’s length, and I found this quote from an interview very helpful… Reines said: “There are so many ways I could have made this book smaller or isolated the glory and just delivered that and cut out all the shit, but that would go against my religion – whatever my religion really is. I’ve always been excited by the idea, artistically, ethically, spiritually, of expanding the frame of what we can report on, of what, in our existence, deserves attention. How do you integrate mystical experience into “normal life.” I don’t even know what normal life is anymore….That was a weird parabola of an answer. I don’t even remember the question. (laughter)”
Yes ok. What does that mean for a book and how a “book” “reads”? I don’t know. But I don’t think that Reines cares, and actually I don’t either, and in fact I like that this book troubles my conception of how long a book of poems “should” be and why. And so why? What makes a poem special? Is it its isolation? Are poems lonely? Are good poems lonelier?
Displaying 1 - 30 of 78 reviews