Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines (born 1982) is an American poet, playwright, performance artist, and translator. Her books of poetry include The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); Mercury (2011); Thursday (2012) and A Sand Book (2019), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Reines has been described by Michael Silverblatt of NPR's Bookworm as "one of the crucial voices of her generation." She describes the subject matter of her work as "bearing witness to the search for the sacred in the 21st century."

Her play Telephone was commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre, and presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre in February 2009, with two Obie wins. She participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial as a member of Semiotext(e). Her performance collaboration with Jim Fletcher, Mortal Kombat, was presented at Le Mouvement in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, in August 2014, and was again presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October 2014.

Biography

Reines was born on October 24, 1982, in Salem, Massachusetts. She said that the Salem Witch Trials were relevant in her writing, saying "I am sure that Salem's history has influenced me in every way. I know that there still lurks in me the fear that if I speak the truth as I know it, I will be locked up in a mental institution and then killed in public while a mockery of me is made." In college, she studied English literature and French, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College. She completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. In 2010, she served as a translator on a UN Mission to Haiti.

Works

The Cow The Cow (Fence Books, 2006) addresses themes of abjection, filth, and disgust. It is framed by several excerpted texts, including a guide to bovine carcass disposal, as well as the Bible, and works by Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, and Marguerite Duras, a structure which Reines has described as "passing all of literature through a hamburger helper." Of the titular figure, Reines has claimed that "the cow is a real modernist figure. I feel like after God died, the cow became the onlooker in great works of modernism...it's like the residue of the divine in the twentieth century." Reines' writing style in The Cow has been described as one that "appropriates and shreds other texts, but which sometimes hides the theft; a search for beauty under piles of carcasses both metaphorical and real"; the same review pointed out that "in the context of such fraught, relentless hammering, such brief moments of beauty can risk seeming like desperately mimed cliches."

Coeur de Lion Coeur de Lion (Mal-o-Mar, 2007; reissued by Fence Books, 2011) is a book-length poem addressed to an elusive, fractured, "you," who Reines has stated constitutes "the 'you' of YouTube and advertising...what the impoverished 'I' is made of." Telephone consists of three sections: one recreates the first ever phone call, between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson; the second is centered on Ms. St., a patient of Carl Jung who believed she had a telephone inside of her; the third brings the three characters together. The second act of Telephone was expanded into a short piece entitled Miss St.'s Hieroglyphic Suffering, and was presented as part of The Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series in November 2009, again starring Birgit Huppuch.

Mercury Mercury (Fence Books, 2011) consists of several intermeshed long poems. Its five sections each begin with alchemical symbols, which, according to B. K. Fisher, writing for the Boston Review, places the reader "in a realm where the transmutation of materials is an analogy for personal purification and esoteric or spiritual quest." Reines has stated that Mercury is "a ground, a field, a structure in which the poems can resonate together as much more than merely themselves."

A Sand Book A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019) is a psychedelic meditation on climate change, violence, peacocks, Paul Celan, surveillance, the sun, the occult, Judaism, time travel, the dissolution of language, and more. It consists of twelve sections of poems and ends with "Mosaic," a transmission from the sun. A Sand Book was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Teaching

Reines has taught at Tufts University, Columbia University, The New School, and The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. and the Poetry Project. In the fall of 2012, and again in 2013, she led a workshop called Ancient Evenings, which facilitated a communion around ancient texts.

In 2012, Reines led a vision quest in New Mexico.