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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.
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Upcoming Events

Books Are Magic’s Small Press Small Fest

Date:
Location:
Books Are Magic (Montague Street) in Brooklyn, NYview map
Books Are Magic presents the second annual Small Press Small Fest, a celebration of indie publishers with readings and signings from special guests, free swag, and of course, stacks on stacks of books! Graywolf Press will table from 2:00 to 5:00, with readings from Ariana Reines (The Rose) and Stacey D'Erasmo (The Long Run) from 3:00 to 4:00. RSVP encouraged. Click here for details.

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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