Description

The award-winning poet reckons with feminine archetypes, erotic love, and the shifting boundary between power and surrender

Fury is very lustful
A body concealing its heart’s desire

Has a certain texture
A tang or an edge if you will

That the openhearted cannot match
& when exactly does the deceitful

Heart 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.

Publisher Review

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 *