The Cow

by Ariana Reines

This text is filthy and fertilized, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, atrocious and politic with meaning. The Cow is a mother, a lover, and a murdered lump of meat, rendered in the strongest of languages. "I cannot count the altering that happens in the very large rooms that are the guts of her."

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Fiction, American, Contemporary

109 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2006

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

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

1. Reines is brave and honest because she's willing to admit that being socialized as female is, effectively, being trained to be a corpse.

2. This book starts out politely invitational and theoretical, but something terribly scatological happened about 20 pages in where the lingua bacteria exponentially multiplied. I realized my readership wasn’t shaking the book’s hand, but was actually fisting this orifice of resistance Reines had carved out of our shared pulpy body.

3. This book is shit. Not as in “this book is bad,” but as in this book is shit because all language is shit. It’s what we excise and roll around in. This book is shit, an accursed share, a corpse I’m eating that looks so much like my own corpse (see 1). Just like the brains of cows that are forced to consume their moms and sisters liquefied bodies, all of my lady friends' brains are full of holes. Except instead of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, our brain’s holes look like typographic counters. Our prions will never be quarantined because language and gender have gone septic and you, reader, want to fuck these holes.

4. This book is one of the most righteously helpful books when talking intersectionality between women and non-human animals. It steers the discussion away from pitfalling into an anthropomorphization of non-human animals, and away from reductively equating humans as animals end transmission. Instead, it refocuses: it's about flesh. This book acknowledges a certain type of flesh whose primary mode of being is one of corpsing.

[Nation Hirstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a terrifying fuckbook, and it sort of makes me wish my asshole weren't so dirty, and that I didn't ever want my parts to touch other peoples' pieces, and that everybody had kittens instead of cocks and bowls of milk for vaginas. Like everything was in a picture book your mom read you. But guess what. This is life and we're living where our temples are in sewers and it is fucking repugnant.

[Farren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy Jesus.

Read this book, cover to cover, in rapt horror. Then read it again. Topically:

The industrial processing of cow carcasses, piece by piece, stage by stage, for complete consumption.

The formal (in broken, wild manic clipped lines, in borrowed material from John Ashbery and the Merck Veterinary Manual, in long digressions and expletive laden outbursts) and literal violence to traditional and contemporary poetry ("While American poetry dissolved its I the starvational and massacred bodies of all the world larded newspapers with their blood and guts. Shit. LYRIC. Maybe you don't need an I. An I's dress literature can wear to be everything. Want to be infinity. Speaking but over yourself.")

The systematic debasement of the female form, both as a potentially-sexual object, the sloe-eyed, oversexed "cow" of a mother (Ma Ma. MOUTH MOUTH / Mean ME ME everything I can feel inside/ What skin. What hair. What eyes, gold tooth. What muscles. What udder. / What are hooves. The liver, what liver. What stomach. Horns. Where isn't she. Where isn't she inside her body. Where is she / not. Where is she least. / There was a whole body that went before me: it was her. / Stretch marks on her stomacher." ) And to a lesser extent, the used-up woman, the Hag.

The broadly scatological, by which I mean all taboo bodily processes, but especially shit and semen.

But all of this in a heap, in a constantly-moving, dissolving, reemerging, aligning and breaking with itself. The themes are so familiar but the wild, lawless, free-associative construction of the line/poem/text really fascinated me. Deliberate, surely, but what was the aim?

The image, finally, was of a stomach. A great, textual cow-stomach in which all of these thing dissolve into an associative mass through which some things filter out and are disposed, and some nourish.

After this essay Reines penned in Action Yes! Quarterly, it was all, DUH: http://www.actionyes.org/issue6/reine...

POEM POEM GET UP POEM

And of course, and ALWAYS:

"You have got to goad yourself toward a becoming that is in accordance
with what you are innate. You have got to sometimes become the
medicine you want to take. You have got to, you have absolutely got to
put your face into the gash and sniff, and lick. You have got to learn to
get sick. You have got to reestablish the integrity of your emotions so
that their violence can become a health and so that you can keep on
becoming. There is no sacrifice. You have got to want to live. You have
got to force yourself to want to."

I had a lot of feelings about this book. It got INTO my head. That doesn't happen very often.

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have you ever been to a landfill? Once I went with my dad to a landfill. I was surprised that it was open to the public. Vultures wheeled overhead. We drove through mountains of trash until we got to this one place where you got to dump your shit, all while the sun baked it all into a perfect souffle of stink. We unloaded some unwanted furniture. As we were leaving, I noticed a dead horse in the bed of a truck. Three men were pushing the dead weight off their vehicle. The horse flopped off the truck like wet carpet, rolled a little ways before stopping.

How come this is not allowed to be exterior to the poem. Because the poem does not shoot out from a source it is of the world. While American poetry dissolved its I the starvational and massacred bodies of all the world larded newspapers with their blood

and guts. Shit. LYRIC. An integrity must come back to a body, and from thence, into a world, a world where a body can adore another one, or the sun, or a part of a thought under it, or the night. Maybe nobody wants to kill you because of what they think you are, or rape you, or treat you like a piece of shit. Maybe you don't need an I. An I's a dress literature can wear to be everything. Want to be infinity. Speaking but over yourself. Can a book carry you into the world you have to pretend doesn't exist most of the time, can a book carry you back out into what first made you alive.

To be laid open, metaphorically speaking is not enough, must be carried out literally. The need for a kind of connection through the splayed innards of the poet, a bodily connection where a spiritual connection is lacking or impossible because. It's 2011. Ariana's strategy is shock-cum-deadened-mass, and I admire her urgency, her good intentions. She wants her reader to become deadened in order to realize their already deadened state, so that they can begin the work of discarding the corpse. Having the corpse rejuvenated in a million forms, into the plastic we eat and the plastic we sit on.

INDUSTRY IS EVERYTHING

Sometimes I think if I can find a way to really feel my mere going could become as succor to the ruined women I love but it never does. The guilt of knowing the world's evil and still wanting to live in it.

JUST SAW OPEN AND SEE

That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten

END

The urgency to say the unsayable, but also that nothing is unsayable. That none of this is shocking, though so desparately wanting to be, is sad. So the unsayable takes the form of the unfashionable, the insensible, the silly, the personal (for the personal is the residue of shit, the casualty of lights). But extremities are absorbed into everydayness. We hear you not.

Where does life exist. What if everything could be as tender and durable as a genital.
I want to found a country where everybody feels.
Universes shooting out of matter so tiny you can feel it.
How to be liquid how to be gas how to be Freon, music, how to be flesh or inside of flesh that is living and how to be its equal, how not to be less than it, how not to divide the capital from the provinces, how to be.

[Lightsey]

This is one of the more disturbing and disgusting books of poetry I've ever read. Still, Reines's verve and Steinian wit are keeping me going.
**
Update: I find myself resistant to the process part of this book (not a section but a strand). I know the project--put the flesh back on the bones, acknowledge the mess, etc--and Reines even addresses the reader's unwillingness directly--but to address is not to convince, still less to impel. I'm just not going with it. . . I can't help thinking that the project of redirtying the house of literature just takes us in a circle. . . Still, all books/works fail; I like that this one tries (and then there's Reines's talent to consider, too). I'll certainly look at her next.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

yeah. gonna need to live with this one a while.

though i gotta say, mischievously, that i wish i had written this, if only for the "megan milks' the cow" jokes -- ah, childhood persecution

[Rusty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brutal, ugly, beautiful book. If you're looking for an intellectual edge in your poetry, this is it. You'll be picking pieces out of your teeth for days.

[crista maria]

"There was a kink in the thing that was a girl
It wasn't enough
There was a mutt in the girl but it wasn't enough
It wasn't enough ENOUGH ENOUGH for what
It wasn't enough FOR ANYTHING TO BECOME TRUE ENOUGH
TO LIVE ON EVEN THE TINIEST LITTLE BIT"

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Coeur de lion I was so nervous but this book is great

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reines frequently lands on some prolific, breathtaking insight—lines you instantly want to write down, to never forget, to perhaps tattoo someday—but the poems here (and in MERCURY, which I finished, and COUER DE LION, which I abandoned ten pages in and found just godawful) just as often strike me as contrived and extra-affected. Reines is undoubtedly *extremely* intelligent and extremely well-read, and that shows. I'm interested in how she fucks with theoretical concepts by making them interfere with the "lowbrow," but her strategy ultimately reveals itself—approximately half of the poem will be interested in making or unmaking meaning, and the other half will be jumbled, magnet-poetry nonsense strewn with cunts and dicks and semen and blowjobs and shit-taking and shit-eating and vomiting and vomit-eating and bleeding. Which I'm all for, I suppose, but too often it felt like Reines was asking me to be shocked, or asking me to disrupt my train of thought, by forcing me to confront what she'd placed before me, but that's difficult to do the more her poetic strategies reveal themselves, page by page.

None of this is to say that I think Reines is even remotely untalented. I think she's probably just not for me. But I'm very interested in her work, and I'm glad to have read her. I like the opportunity to challenge my sensibilities, and Reines is a great writer to turn to if that, too, is your objective. And I'd read her next book, too.

[Joe]

Too late to this party. Oh well. Reines charts how gendered & species-ed giving, receiving, secreting, sawing, sinks, holes, waste, trash, production have been and are becoming in a kind of compost-cud poetics that draws on works from Stein, Baudelaire, Celan, D & G, Cixous. TC doesn’t wear it’s learning on its sleeve, however, as ideas, stances, gender & eco politics, slip in and out of visibility, are located in and rocket away from living breathing, viscous exchanging bodies and forms. New possibilities proliferate but not without acknowledging the toll/toil of the current situation—“Tonight three guys in a car said can we help you with your hardon. / That was the most genderfuck catcall I ever pretended I wasn’t hearing as I walked by it. / I am so tired, deep deep inside. I am tired. / This ceaseless squabble. What Mandelstam said. / What. Now what Go on. Go on.” No clue how the Koran stuff is operating (seems like a promising but unfollowed thread...step careful) but I care enough to reread, to be watchful, to let Reines run amok though my head and goop.

[Leanna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. And there were a few lines that amazed me. And I generally like the creepy project of exploring female physicality through the lens of cows and their slaughter!

But there was a lot of uses of "signification" "meaning" and other phenomenological terms that made the whole book feel like of lit grad school-y. I think the author was, like, 25 when she wrote it, so it's a pardonable crime! But while I liked the premise, this book was executed in a way that took itself SO seriously, that was SO interested in spelling out its meaning-making, was SO interested in being a hipster's Gertrude Stein. Also, there was an emphasis on shit. Lots of shit.

This book felt rather pretentious and amateurish to me. But because of the handful of stellar lines that I loved, I should probably withhold my judgment a bit more.

[Juliet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I was going to like this when the first piece of the book included "It is not easy to be honest because it is impossible to be complete."

Here is one of the shorter poems from the book, which I love:

SECONDS

Are you so intelligent your body doesn't have you in it.
Everything could be beautiful maybe.
If it wasn't already a factory.
A milking machine is a machine attached to the valve of a body that is living.
That body has veins and is a little rosy at the teat.
Sucking is the main thing. It is the first thing to be done.
What came first, the milk or the suck.
Whatever she is so full of it.
What came first, the milk or the suck.
She is full of it, full of it, full of it.

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Because the poem does not shoot out from a source it is of the world. While American poetry dissolved its I the starvational and massacred bodies of all the world larded newspapers with their blood and guts. Shit. LYRIC."

[cy]

I read it and let it wash over me and it was horrible. I miss my mom and I’m sorry. Reines’s writing in this is so transcendent that it’s once again mired, which is actually the only way to transcend.

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning of this book started off incredibly strong! However, I felt that the journey "to the other side of animal" became more of a crawl and repetitive. In many ways, it was comfortably grosteque and created a unique placement for the reader

[Anja · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow😭

[Christian Prince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sexy quotable poetry with a sharp PETA slant. Violent poems for vegans or unashamed carnivores. Delivers slaughterhouse brutality but also how the slaughterhouse bleeds into modern human life (as with mad cow disease). A brilliant deliriant that smells of insomnia and well-earned poverty.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young woman comes to consciousness at an odd crossroads, like she's been summoned by Faust. Stuck between competing impossibilities, her head spins off. Is she demon-possessed, or merely one of the few who has eyes open enough to see?

In a sense, it feels like Reines is starting over completely, exploring with language in an effort to re-teach herself how to speak, how to comprehend, how to convey. On the other hand, she betrays a grad school education that she sometimes hides, sometimes flaunts. She shows Gertrude Stein on her sleeve and doesn't care what you think about it. Her writing is at times so opaque that it's almost as offensive as the bouts of swearing. One might be tempted to complain, that she's using "filthy language" as my dad would say. But shouldn't language encapuslate all parts of human life, not just the parts we like to think about? So often we hide behind medicalizations or bureaucratic legaleze, but Reines repeatedly questions this. As Orwell pointed out, the only way we can commit despicable war crimes is by sanitizing them through a filter of language, instead calling them "ethnic cleansings" or "pacifications."

Reines forces us as readers to do work. Her job here wasn't lazy, even if some of these poems felt quite like my early morning stream of consciousness poems. Instead, they showed off the effort put in behind the scenes, all the reading and thinking and living she had done up to that point. It's a lot like a jazz soloist belting out something no one's ever heard. Of course it's difficult, perhaps just as difficult or even more difficult than accurately playing some pre-arranged song. They're two different kinds of difficulty: one of precision, the other of creativity.

Just like with Jazz, Reines' poems reward patience. Perhaps you can call this a fault of contemporary art more broadly, but I'm tempted to say the fault lies in the modern disordered consensus of bingeing media, which of course despises rumination. Rumination is the right word, hence cows chewing the cud. Using another metaphor, one of processing their corpses rather than watching them eat: meaning slowly percolates through the pressure of sustained effort. Like separating the constituent parts of the cow, this poetry collection drifts between cloudy and clear moments, between the alluring and the disgusting aspects of embodiment. In a time of so much gnosticism about the body, Reines bravely embraces the smelly, misshapen things we inhabit every day.

Certainly it's not brave in terms of being horribly original or even being irreverent: that's all already been done before. Rather, she's brave to return to an earthy approach amidst so much cerebral abandonment of reality. For example, one of my least favorite poems published by Poetry magazine, called "Queerodactyl," is a maze of pop culture references and excessive queer sexuality. You may ask me, "but Mark, that sounds a lot like this, minus the queerness," to which I'd reply that this is quite the opposite.

Most contemporary poetry is so smug in its verbing of nouns and nouning of verbs, and it stays in a perfectly neat little line with what's politically correct. It insults all the right enemies, making a mockery of everything good and true in the world. Reines, by contrast, sustains the disgust. She doesn't revel in sex and leave it at that, assuming that our contemporary mores are self-evident. Rather, she flounders in the blood spilled on the slaughterhouse killing floor. Hers is a moral dilemma, a chaos, a confusion, not a moral certainty. She writhes as she writes about her sexual encounters, loving and hating them in equal parts. Even the few literary references she makes are well integrated enough that no prior knowledge is required for enjoyment, only openness. Rather than drawing attention to her cleverness (or to the references themselves, just because), she draws attention to the language, to the poems themselves, and to the confusing nexus she finds herself in. To some degree, the cow > slaughter > women > sex connections are obvious, but she holds your head to the grindstone and doesn't let up. She forces you to think through the obvious to the less-obvious. In other words, she watches the headless cows drain blood, but she keeps eating burgers. I know this because of the parallel, that sexuality disgusts and confuses her, yet she still has sex.

She varies enough in her language that this vacillation doesn't get old, however. She has some exceptionally dense sections, but pretty regularly it flattens out into something more straightforward, something even insultingly simple, repetitive. At one point she uses the phrase "up my thing," which, in contrast to all the explicitness which came before, somehow feels more dehumanizing than at least the angry warmth of swearing. This contrasting comes to a head in the final section, one brilliantly set apart by a quote from the Koran ("Do you then believe in part of the Book and disbelieve the other?") and by an original (?) phrase: "I have to get to the other side of the animal." She includes (I would assume) verbatim excerpts from some manual explaining cow processing, and she includes her own poetic responses below them.

The line "I don't want her but I have her" (67) ripped me open completely. Such a line might exist in the corpus of some shitty instagram poet, but in amongst all the hanging corpses in this cold refrigerator room, it shines so darkly it almost blinds you. Another phrase, this time from p. 76: "They let me out today but I have to go back tomorrow and I will. I don't want them to hurt me more than I already know how to handle." There is something pathetic and pitiable in the simplicity of these statements, which sound so simple that they might be the thoughts of cows being led to slaughter. After the first section, which had such dense verbosity, such exceptional diction and vocabulary, we have the resigned, low moos of a creature who knows only lament.

Surprisingly, this never felt preachy to me, it never even felt manipulative. She didn't tell us that we're awful people if we choose to keep eating meat, because she didn't even fixate on the worst conditions that some cows in factory farms endure. Mostly what the handbook section described were normative conditions after slaughter, which she pointed out was more humane for us Christians than it is for Kosher or Halal butchers. The two things she fixated on were the processing after death (a bizarre, [al]chemical annihilation) and the complications that can accompany cow births. Essentially, life and death, the only two interesting things to talk about. So in reality, this wasn't an esoteric book, though sometimes the Stein-ian influence made it feel so. Instead, I think it's much fairer to read it as a high water mark of contemporary experimental poetry before the Poetry Foundation homogenized everything into squeaky clean faux-rebellion political bullshit. There was a brief, brief moment in literary history that this book could emerge, one that would tolerate such violent experimentation (in the early 00's), but deadening politics weren't yet ubiquitous (late 2010's onward). I'm excited to get my print copy of this soon so I can mark it up and use it for poetic inspiration. Thanks Ariana.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been on kind of a poetry bender but find it hard to write about poetry. This is a totally amazing collection that works around a set of bovine themes - the relationship between capitalism and the body, gender, sex, relationships, family, writing. These are not all obviously cattle-related but Reynes does more than make the connections work, she's a materialist, anchors them all in body fluids and tangible humiliations. Her writing is beautiful and painful, hilarious resistant to linear meaning and constantly welling up and erupting with, uh, insight - I don't know, that's kind of banal, I mean lines that rear up out of nowhere and punch through my defences. I wish this was the kind of book a bunch of my friends would read so we could turn her zingiest lines into in-jokes and repeat them endlessly out of context. "When I die I will become everything A TURDUCKEN." This would be facile or whatever but also devastating so I don't know.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried, I really did. But really just so much of the writing seemed -- however intelligent -- painfully, solipsistically adolescent. And not that this in itself might not have produced something useful and engaging, but the whiff of the seminar room was just too strong for me. I hope at least her professors were pleased with it.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sick in the best possible sense of the word.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have so much to say about this book. It is a meditation on disgust. I will have to read it again this summer.

[annakatrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was disgusting, indulgent, technical, scatological, and begging me not to enjoy it, but I loved it.

[Paulina]

AFTERWARD

Does a resemblance really mean anything.

The world rhymes too much. Maybe.

A situation of the similar kept aloft by an air that is hating.

I spell it like that because I mean it.

Well, maybe a situation can find a way to be a family against your will.

Or maybe that's just psychoanalysis, I was going to write.

All this "meaning." It is rhyme. Is just rhyme.

And this, this could be it. Liberty.

I am harassed.

Tonight three guys in a car said can we help you with your hardon.

That was the most genderfuck catcall I ever pretended I wasn't hearing as I walked by it.

I am so tired, deep deep inside. I am tired.

This ceaseless squabble. What Mandelstam said.

What. Now what. Go on. Go on.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The poisoned nuance that started everything. It was from eating ourselves. It had to be

Someone else’s sickness first, our silence, our good balance, our usefulness. There is something certain creatures long for. To be hacked up and macerated. That’s having it come out and go into another body.

Eaten, gemmed with grease and herbs. Whose low language ruined our bowels. Whose losing eventually meant nothing. We knew we were to become a realm of flesh. Another nothing.”

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Admirably nauseating collection. Way too insular in the first half – have read "Book Forgive Everything" several times now and have no idea what "the nipple of the world" refers to. Later on, Reines starts to make more sense, especially with her last lines and how they reimagine bodies as "buffers" or "life jackets." The long quotes from factory farm manuals are fascinating and (somehow) fun to read. Good stuff, if you can stomach it.

[ReadinWithSteven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I understood maybe 1% of this, but somehow it took away absolutely none of the impact of these words. The vocabulary is so imaginative and oddly strung together, and somehow it's all so vivid. This is the most well-organized poetry collection ever and I didn't realize it until halfway through - it's like a story. This book is a whole journey.

[Katelyn Maimone]

horrible horrible horrible book. someone recommended this to me. horrible. for why did they recommend this. hurt my brain to read this. so weird. I don’t understand it. I went to look at some peoples reviews and was just blown away. why are people giving this a 5 star rating…. so fucking weird

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 1 out of 5]

an abomination