The Rose

Reviews / Votes

The Rose, Reines's fifth and most captivating full-length collection, is all about bodies (historical, mythical, or contemporary). . . .What makes The Rose so pleasurable is that femininity and gender at large is not fixed, nor starved, of its personal needs. In a world overflowing with suffering, there is no want too great, too "silly" (or maybe it is, but who cares?) for Reines's narrator. It feels like a radical act of pleasure -- Hannah Bonner * The Poetry Foundation * Ariana Reines's poetry is what happens when the goddess comes to earth. When ancient mysteries intersect with the effluvia of human life. Nothing is more humbling or unbelievable than the ordinary humanity of an icon. In The Rose, suffering is erotic and exhausting. Love is poisonous and miraculous. The world is abject and hilarious. The goddess can breathe life into being but cannot defeat her own sorrows. The Rose is peerless, divine magic. There's nothing in the world like it -- Jenny Zhang * author of My Baby First Birthday * Thrilling and harrowing, The Rose explores the contours of something essential, diving deep into pain and complexity and describing them in the most factual way. Reines explores a realm of experience with grief as its trigger. Focused, intense The Rose offers a trail that leads, if not to madness, to something that goes beyond rational sense. It's a great book -- Chris Kraus * author of Summer of Hate and Social Practices * The poems in Ariana Reines's The Rose would rather bleed out vaginal vengeance in a sweet fuck obliteration than bow down to a cultural expectation that love is money, or vice versa. 'The larger the lust' she writes, 'the more erotic its refusal.' Reines's poems blister the poem itself, both claiming and breaking open Ashbery's contention that 'death follows death.' Violence's iridescent glee hammers down. Sorrow is sorrow. Heterosexual love is seriously interrogated. The mother is dead. The Rose's exquisite linguistic rendering, gushes wildly with a ferocity (and sometimes a painful, necessary candor) that I, personally, need. I want what Ariana Reines wants shelter in these times on this burning earth. What she offers instead is rigorous and rapturous companionship. I will be reading this book for the rest of my life -- Dawn Lundy Martin * author of Good Stock, Strange Blood *