A Sand Book - Tapa dura

Mind-blowing.--Kim Gordon

Reines' wildly rewarding poems are connected through clarity of voice, generous irreverence, and seemingly limitless purview... it truly contains multitudes.--Booklist (Starred Review)

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

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.

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.

Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to Sandy Hook to Hurricane Sandy to Sandra Bland, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning. In her long-anticipated follow-up to Mercury, Ariana Reines has written her most ambitious, visceral, and satisfying work to date.