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Book Title

The Rose

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Ariana Reines
Poem Excerpt

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”

Body

In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines 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, 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. 

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List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-334-6
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
96
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
An intimate chronicle of grief and sex from a “go-for-broke artist . . . like no one else” (Ben Lerner)

About the Author

Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and performing artist from Salem, Massachusetts. Her books include A Sand Book, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her play Telephone won two Obies and has been performed internationally.
More by author

Upcoming Events

Ariana Reines reading and in conversation about THE ROSE with Edgar Garcia at the Swedish American Museum, hosted by Women & Children First

Date:
Location:
Swedish American Museum in Chicago, ILview map
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP here. Copies of THE ROSE are available for purchase from Women & Children First.

Ariana Reines reading from THE ROSE with Melissa Broder and Elaine Kahn at David Horvitz's Garden

Date:
Location:
David Horvitz's Garden in Los Angeles, CAview map
This event is free and open to the public.

Ariana Reines reading from THE ROSE at Riffraff Bookstore

Date:
Location:
Riffraff Bookstore in Providence, RIview map

Praise

  • “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). . . . I will be reading this book for the rest of my life.”—Dawn Lundy Martin
  • “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
  • 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
  • “Exciting and brimming with unbound genius, Reines' poetry flourishes.”—Diego Báez, Booklist
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