Ariana Reines – författare

The award-winning poet reckons with feminine archetypes, erotic love, and the shifting boundary between power and surrenderFury is very lustfulA body concealing its heart’s desireHas a certain textureA tang or an edge if you willThat the openhearted cannot match& when exactly does the deceitfulHeart open? At climax.—from ‘The Hanged Man’The Rose 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, award-winning poet Ariana Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: ‘I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.’ In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: 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 humour. 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.

Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times.What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to natural disasters and state violence, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning.