Ariana Reines

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 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 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.

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

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. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

"There are phone lines to the living and others for calling the dead. TELEPHONE by Ariana Reines is a network for riveting acts of speech, and silence, and listening. I saw the play and never forgot it. The audience was lit like a switchboard by its storms of courage and mystical love."—Rachel Kushner

"TELEPHONE is an uncanny parcel of theater in which the wishes of humans to speak with the dead meet the limits or the aspirations of technology. A woman wrapped in language is deemed insane and the lonely pastness of our present walks around calling for itself. TELEPHONE is a whild and visionary piece of art that announced to me a poet who is always tearing the future open like a trapped animal—their eyes reflect us. Don't look! We mus. Bless you and love you Ariana for this great work."—Eileen Myles

"I have been WAITING FOR THIS BOOK! When I saw it in the theater every word motion fell into magic stride utterly taxing the soul with its accuracy and mystery. The next night I was at the box office with a different friend and needed to return to my job is the only thing that kept me from the theater a third night. Examine for yourself the bewitching and sometimes misshapen communicative powers of life with the poetry goddess of the stage, Ariana Reines!— CA Conrad

"TELEPHONE, the inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play, probes feelings with the sensitivity and detachment of a heart surgeon."—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

A reissue of the instant cult-classic love poem, an investigation of poetic address.

Now that I am not addressing you
But the "you" of poetry
I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this "I" is the I of poetry
And it should be able to do more than I can do.

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.

To call Ariana Reines’ poetry scatological doesn’t even scratch the surface. “I COULD BE A DIAPER FOR THE DAY’S RESIDUALS,” she writes, and, “She clasped the event to her and proceeded. Fucked her steaming/ eyehole and ended it.” The Cow is a body in the way that texts are bodied—”Are you so intelligent your body doesn’t have you in it.”—but not in the way that allows the text to become desensitized, depersonalized, sterilized.

Winner of the 2006 Alberta Prize

Composed in the direct, accessible, consciousness-piercing style readers of Ariana Reines' first two books are wildly enamored of, Mercury comprises a group of long poems. These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, "communicated" between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema and internet porn.

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 Sandy Hook to Hurricane Sandy to Sandra Bland, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning.

Soft and hardcover available. Please specify which one you would want on checkout. Hardcover is 23 euros. Amount will be adjusted on the invoice.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

The first issue of the magazine made by artists, founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal. Contributions by Mathias Augustyniak, Naomi Campbell, Théo Casciani, Michael Chow, Pan Daijing, Es Devlin, Claire Fontaine, Edwin Frank, Theaster Gates, Nicolas Godin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Hedi El Kholti, Michèle Lamy, Paul McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Eileen Myles, Marc Newson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Ariana Reines, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Julian Schnabel & Jason Momoa, Hanna Schygulla, Juergen Teller, Iké Udé, McKenzie Wark, Robert Wilson, Yohji Yamamoto.

Alphabet is the artists' magazine. Here, they run the show. They write, they make images, they select their own works, they interview the figures they admire, they tell us what we did not know about them nor could have ever fathomed about life. This magazine is conceived entirely to put them in the driver's seat, and to enable readers to become part of the unique vision of some of today's greatest luminaries.

It is a manifestation of the creative community, coming together from all fields, from all generations and threads of culture. Writers, musicians, designers, painters, sculptors, poets—artistic figures of every kind converse all the time in their lives, but they did not have a shared space for their editorial projects. This is it.

Everyone who finds their way into Alphabet has made a mark on life, art, and culture, in a way that signals their importance to the present. Some of the contributors may be world famous, others well respected, others on the way to becoming the legends they already are. Their relevance to culture is the same, and that is why they all belong here, in the endeavor of the creative community. There is no hierarchy of status, or domain, or apparent impact. Some of the greatest revolutions happen undercover. Some of the most established voices are still breaking ground. The magazine's premise is simple: the old opposition between pop and underground does not make sense anymore. There are many creative communities, each following its own rules, each inventing its own space. Here, wherever they come from, whatever their community, artists can exist together, with the same intention of changing, and improving, what life is; with the same belief that art matters more than anything else.

None of the contributors is here randomly. They keep life thrilling and exhilarating, challenge the perception of everything and anything. Their role in shaping every aspect of life can hardly be overstated. That is why they needed a place to elaborate their own alphabet, their way of ordering and structuring language, the world, and the fabric of life—a place of freedom, where everything would be done to highlight their visions, where the very design would be a shrine to their magic. Even the distribution of the magazine was conceived with artists—each contributor suggesting sites of their liking.

Alphabet is also the magazine of magazines. Here, readers find essays, fictions, poetry, visual projects, DIY methods, recommendations from those who know, even games and astrology—and an artist's alphabet, articulating an entire universe. Anything that has ever formed a section of a magazine could find its way here. Even the cover is conceived by an artist: it was conceived especially by the legendary Robert Wilson. Artists will rejuvenate what magazines are, and magazines will be kept forever young by and with them.

Founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal, Alphabet is a bi-yearly art magazine. Not a magazine about art. It's a magazine made by artists. Each contribution like an œuvre, making it the ultimate collector piece. Each cover is designed, with the word Alphabet, by a different artist, initiating a cult series.

A collection of lectures transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University's Summer Writing Program that represent a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. 

New Weathers asks us to consider how poetics might embolden deeper engagements with the world. Collected from the alternative education zone founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg with the aim of opening up discourse and fostering political engagement, these texts invoke issues of gender and race-based injustice, the global climate crisis, and our possible extinction. They weave through our poetic community, the conversations we are having, the issues we are facing—our "new weathers" to posit strategies of resistance. 

List of Contributors: Paula Gunn Allen, Amiri Baraka, Dan Beachy-Quick, Sherwin Bitsui, Robin Blaser, William S. Burroughs, Julie Carr, J'Lyn Chapman, Jos Charles, Jack Collom, Samuel R. Delany, kari edwards, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tonya M. Foster, Forrest Gander, Alan Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Renee Gladman, Robert Glück, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Thurston Moore, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Margaret Randall, Roger Reeves, Ariana Reines, Lisa Robertson, Ed Sanders, Andrew Schelling, Cedar Sigo, Eleni Sikelianos, Harry Smith, Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Asiya Wadud, Peter Warshall, Eliot Weinberger, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

A unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word "pathetic"  

"Literature is pathetic." So claims Eileen Myles in their bold and bracing introduction to Pathetic Literature, an exuberant collection of pieces ranging from poetry to theater to prose to something in between, all of which explore those so-called "pathetic" or sensitive feelings around which lives are built and revolutions are incited.  

Myles first reclaimed the word for a seminar they taught at the University of California San Diego, rescuing it from the derision into which it had slipped and restoring its original meaning of inspiring emotion or feeling, from the Ancient Greek rhetorical method pathos. Their reinvention of "pathetic" formed the bedrock for this anthology, which includes a breathtaking 106 contributors, encompassing titans of global literature like Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges, Rumi, and Gwendolyn Brooks, queer icons and revolutionaries like Dodie Bellamy, Samuel R. Delany, and Bob Flanagan, as well as the invigorating newness and excitement of writers on the rise, including Nicole Wallace, Precious Okoyomon, and Will Farris. Creative nonfiction by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jack Halberstam, and Porochista Khakpour rubs shoulders with poetry by Natalie Diaz, Victoria Chang, Lucille Clifton, and Ariana Reines, all joined by prose from Chester Himes, Djuna Barnes, Chris Kraus, and Qiu Miaojin, among so many others. The result is a matchless anthology that is as much an ongoing dialogue as an essential compendium of queer, revolutionary, joyful, and always moving literature.  

From confrontations with suffering, embarrassment, and disquiet, to the comforts and consolations of finding one's familiar double in a poem, Pathetic Literature is a swarming taxonomy of ways to think differently and live pathetically on a polarized and fearful planet.

In Cunt Norton, the sequel to her unforgettable CUNT UPS, Dodie Bellamy "cunts" The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature.

The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems ("the greatest fuck poem in the English language," according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. "These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well," Bellamy writes. Even as Cunt Norton dismembers the history of English poetry, "cunting" Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new sexual members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy's cunted texts breathe life into literary "masters" with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion. 

While ending an affair with a Buddhist teacher, Dodie Bellamy wrote about it simultaneously on her blog. This experiment in writing in extremis explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and Bellamy's confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. What is personal, what is public? In the electronic age, can anybody tell the difference?

The Buddhist celebrates marginalized subjectivity as enacted in the work of female artists from Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneeman, to Bhanu Kapil and Ariana Reines. The Allone Co. Edition contains the essence of the blog, as well as more extended narratives too explicit to post on line.

Design by Wayne Smith

The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal is the portrait of a true humanist who made a career out of compassion. Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a "revolutionary whore," Grisélidis Réal (1929-2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client's incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes.

Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes' rights. She has described prostitution as "an art, and a humanist science," noting that "the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists...who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart..."

This volume includes lengthy dialogues from 1979-1981 with Réal conducted by journalist and author Jean-Luc Henning, in which she eloquently discusses the theoretical implications of sex-positive whoring and relates her experiences both inside and outside the profession: from her lengthy love affair with the "Berber" to such "psychological" and "special" clients as the "moldy rhinoceros."

The "Little Black Book" that rounds out this book is drawn from the logs in which Réal kept track of her many clients, from "Pedro, hilarious fat Spaniard, devoted, simple, honest, fat peasant face, 70F" to "Pierre 8 (from Basel), blue eyes, fifties, slightly balding, cultivated, sweet-violent...licks my finger after I remove it from his anus...100-400F." It is a journal that not only chronicles Réal's working life, but offers a clinically direct, investigative sociological analysis of the sexual subcultures of her time.

Translated by Ariana Reines.

Spells brings together thirty-six contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

With Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh.