A Sand Book

by Ariana Reines

Overview

Longlisted for the National Book Award

"Mind-blowing." —Kim Gordon

DEADPAN, EPIC, AND SEARINGLY CHARISMATIC, A Sand Book chronicles climate change and climate grief, gun violence and bystanderism, state violence and complicity, mourning and ecstasy, sex and love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, tracking new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793330
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	06/18/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	323
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Ariana Reines is author of Mercury (2011) The Cow (2006) and Coeur de Lion (2007). Her play Telephone was produced at the Cherry Lane Theater and won several Obie awards. Reines was 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California Berkeley; she has taught master classes at Pomona College, the University of California Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in New York, NY.

Table of Contents

Arena

Desero 3

Son of a Jar 4

A Partial History 5

Silicosis 12

Haboob 13

Solstice Poem 14

Attar 15

Legend 16

Arena 19

Venice 22

Downtown Standard 23

Glasgow 24

Tenth Body 26

Mistral 28

To the Reader 29

Twelfth Night 35

A Partial History of Iridescence

Dream House 53

Without a Word 57

Sandra 58

Not the Birds 60

I Averted My Eyes from the Rock 61

Magazine Feminism 63

I Can't Give You Anything but Love 67

Bohemian Rhapsody 69

Ramayana 74

Something Inside Me 77

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 81

Gizzard

11/22 95

Mecum Mea Sunt Cuncta 96

Contender 98

Another Dream 99

It Would Be a Smoothness a Jesus 100

Maintaining Intactness of the Silly 101

The End of Me 102

I Had an Idea of Symmetry 103

Boomers 106

The Real Way Things Need to Go 109

I Was Running 110

Old MacDonald Had a Farm 112

Dead Symbolists 114

Schisandra 116

Distinguished Sentiments 118

No Child Left Behind 122

Gizzard 124

Safeway

Running Nymph 129

Who Here Understands English 131

Beauty 133

Skull&Bones 135

In Bloom 138

Emergency Room 141

Try Not to Disturb the Live Palms 143

Wasting Away in This Vanilla Darkness 145

Céleur 147

No Words 148

Night Is Falling 151

Hunted by a Single Thought 152

Queens 153

Joseph's Dream 155

Women Seem Like a Labor 156

This Is the Song of One Hundred 157

Equimo 158

The Shot Heard Round the World 159

Report 160

You Know What Comes Next 161

The Song with the Refrain Like Animals 164

Misuse of Gifts 165

Days of Our Lives 166

Chaps 167

Enlightened Despotism 170

Beef Bacon Chicken and Nuts 172

Participles of Deserere 174

Armorica 179

Thursday 199

The Saddest Year of My Life

Confessional Poem 223

The Saddest Year of My Life 224

Cucurrucucú Paloma 230

To Live in a Jewel Was Bliss 231

Inner Life 232

Hegeling Before the Glass 233

He Smelled Androgenic 234

Chinook 236

Saint John Passion 238

Me Too 239

Mom Jeans 243

The Chlorophyll in Her Water Matches 244

Diary 248

Doubt 249

Wellfleet 250

Tiffany's Poems

Sic 263

"I have to get it all down Tiffany" 264

Dream 265

Scrambled Eggs 266

She Held 269

Tiffany Made Me 270

Lambada Literary Award 271

The Thought "The Greatest City in the World" 272

It Looks Beautiful and I Can't Understand It Said God 273

All Dead 274

The Stores Are Full 275

If These Poems Were Tiffany's 276

She 277

25 August 278

Unanswered Question 279

How Come 280

The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor 281

Nine Moons 288

Nine Neoclassical Poems

Alcibiades 294

Like Two Empty Wallets My Boobs 295

Crystal Geyser 296

Prometheus or Something 298

I'd Like 299

Ditch Face 301

Rigid Frigid Be With Me Saint Brigid 303

And When I Awoke Nothingness 304

The War on April 305

Rotisserie 310

Bitch of the World 312

I Know from Experience If the Difficult Poem 313

Folk Song 315

On the Night of Tiffany's Thirtieth Birthday 317

Tikkun Olam 319

If I Won It Then I Won It Only 320

I Got Used 321

All I Have to Do 323

Still Groaning Under All She Owed 325

Nine Neoclassical Poems 326

Fkn Ziggurats

Fkn Ziggurats 333

It Is a Suckling Love 334

Democracy Now 335

Rapes Eons Fisheries 336

Your Poem 337

I Can't Eat You Can't Sleep 338

Who Aren't We 339

Pilgrims' Progress 340

Open Fifths 343

Mosaic 357

Acknowledgments 399

Editorial Reviews

07/01/2019

In her fourth full collection, poet, playwright, and performance artist Reines (Tiffany's Poems) presents a passionate portrayal of a young woman struggling to live and love in a complex world. Throughout, she imbues the ordinary with depth and uniqueness ("The sun rose debarred/ By the tall beards of the bank// Buildings"). Spiritualism is an occasional theme, as are music and travel ("Don't you understand by now// That dust can fall on anything/ In any country"), and the poet weaves the personal and political ("i was in buenos aires/ bleeding, with a Kavanaugh/ migraine") while investigating the ecological ("Do you remember when Fire and Ice was a bad perfume"). These and family illness and dysfunction provide dark backdrops, yet the writer persists in celebrating life: "pyramidal mandarins" and "Singed broccoli florets of my heart." VERDICT In a collection this large, some, even many, poems could have been weeded. But readers will be pulled in by the quality of the writing, which throbs with a Kerouac-like energy, and the poet's worldview, at once innocent and world-weary, cosmopolitan and everyday.—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Library Journal

03/18/2019

The fourth book from Reines (Mercury) is ambitious in its scope and artistic vision, offering a postmodern take on the epic poem. Like some of the major long-form poets who have preceded her, among them H.D., Lorine Niedecker, and Adrienne Rich, Reines inhabits and renegotiates the space of the long poem. The nine-part poem’s sprawling scope considers Hurricane Sandy, the mountains of Haiti, and Twitter, offering conceptually interesting passages and a wholly original response. Despite these strengths, the poems in this volume occasionally traffic in abstraction, failing to ground vague concepts in sensory detail: “Many of us had succumbed to quivering/ Idiocy while others drew vitality from careers.” Throughout the book, Reines’s enjambments heighten the sense of irony that characterizes her approach to the feminist epic. She writes, for example: “Nothing she meant to make a big/ Deal of, only some tiny budging/ Of memory.” The poems operate primarily on the level of ideas, rather than through lyrical language, though the speaker’s deadpan tone does not always succeed in creating the sense of momentum needed to propel the reader through this textual landscape. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Reines' wildly rewarding poems are connected through clarity of voice, generous irreverence, and seemingly limitless purview... it truly contains multitudes."

Booklist (Starred Review)

"Reines opens us to new possible uses of language."

Hong Kong Review of Books

"Ariana Reines is my favorite living poet, and A Sand Book is one of her greatest acts of alchemy: a poetic supernova transcending magazine feminism, faultless views, the branding of basically everything. To be fully human requires an act of sorcery nowadays, and Reines is that sorceress."

Melissa Broder

"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. Lines like 'the suffering of woman is/ the story of the universe' will linger in the front of your skull, imprinting themselves on your consciousness in a way that feels risky and real, like you've unlocked the key to some hidden truth, some undiscovered light."

NYLON

"Reines opens us to new possible uses of language."

the Hong Kong Review of Books

"Reines navigates existential calamity as she does literature and language. . . . A Sand Book shows her consciousness at its most expansive and integrated to date. These poems understand nothing so well as their own inevitable incompleteness—that no composition could contain everything, that every history is partial"

The New Yorker

"Reines' wildly rewarding poems are connected through clarity of voice, generous irreverence, and seemingly limitless purview. . . it truly contains multitudes."

Starred Review Booklist

"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. . . . It is Western poetry returned to its ‘epic’ classical origins – meaty and full of drama, with more Big Dick Energy than any ‘Great American Novel’."

The White Review

"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

"Read her for the power of her vision, and for her willingness to look at tragedy, whether personal or planetary, head-on. As the planet grows hotter, as civilization becomes increasingly brutal, banal, and irreal, a voice as powerful as Reines’s is too valuable to neglect. A Sand Book is a necessary guide to a future rapidly becoming the present, a map of the desert we all have to navigate."

Adroit Journal

"Mind-blowing."

Kim Gordon

"Maybe you don't automatically reach for poetry when you're plugging the Coors into your beach cooler, but Ariana Reines' A Sand Book is an epic, perfect beach read. At nearly 400 pages, this gorgeous and terrifying travelogue and book of mourning has enough poems to get you from blue June to haunted October. "

GQ - Karen Russell

"A Sand Book’s achievement, in its lyricism and its philosophy, cannot be understated. With this book of books, Reines transmits and distils the miasma of our reality—in all of its impossible completeness—in order to leave us with something that feels like truth."

SSENSE

"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. Her poems and various performances and even her posts are fetishes in a much deeper sense: they are sites of (and screens for) irrational and transpersonal powers. 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. I just looked up “bleeding edge” on Wikipedia and here is what it says: “A technology may be considered bleeding edge where it contains a degree of risk.” There might be “a lack of consensus.” Or “a lack of testing.” There might be “industry resistance to change.” With Ariana’s art the risks are real and we should run them."

Ben Lerner