Ariana Reines | The Rose | Graywolf | April 2025 | 96 pages
Ariana Reines’s latest collection of poetry is fizzing with phrases but her unique style takes some getting used to. Many of her poems are allusive, but sometimes what they’re alluding to eludes the reader. Reines refuses to dumb down her lines and subjects (dumbing down being the current fashion in poetry), though her poems are almost as often crass as they are esoteric. We live in a world that lives and breathes prose—not poetry. Reading prose does us no harm, but to live exclusively in the world of prose renders us deaf to what language can do. Reines’s poetry pushes, pulls, and twists language for all it’s worth. The delight that the patient reader experiences after rereading a Reines poem is worth the effort, even if the effort can at times become irritating. Reines’s real life rises in the ambiguity.
There are eight poems titled after the ancient Greek sorceress Medea, but they don’t tell Medea’s story—or are even relevant to Medea in some instances. There are also four poems titled “Correction,” though it isn’t always clear what, if anything, Reines is correcting (she does correct a previous poem saying she lied when she said she wanted to be hurt: “You couldn’t possibly slap me hard enough // to make this pain go away.”). Themes of misandry and misogyny run throughout the book: “It may be that I suffer because I use men as muses & because the thought of my muse’s stupidity amuses me.” That sentence is from one of the untitled prose poems found at the beginning of the book, though Reinesograms may be better names for them than prose poems. They’re mostly directed to these nameless muses: “& I steady myself to receive his words distinguishing me from every other woman he has ever known.”
Reines is an eccentric; she’s a cross pollination between John Ashbery and Kim Addonizio. Addonizio was once referred to by a critic as “Bukowski in a sun dress,” and you can see a bit of Bukowskian violence in Reines as well:
Later he smashed all the butt plugs
& knifed up the dildos & oiled
& gouged my leather bed, oiled
The bedroom door. Shattered
A window sash. & when I tried
Stopping speaking to him he broke
The lock on the kitchen door & forced
His way back in.
Some of Reines’s lines are opaque and puzzling, when we come across “how did Liz put it? sinister innocence // for some of us / on Earth there is only one honest place” we have to wonder who Liz is. Perhaps Elizabeth Bishop who wrote in her poem “Questions of Travel,” “Should we have stayed home, / wherever that may be?” Often there’s a temptation to dismiss a Reines poem without an attempt at dismantling it first.
Reines’s brother Dave was committed to a mental institution: “They’d have you give your head / Over to their care.” She visited him weekly in the Rockland Psychiatric Institute, the same institute that is mentioned in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. She mistakenly believes, like a lot of people do, that Ginsberg met Carl Solomon (whom Howl is dedicated to) in the Rockland Institute. The refrain “I’m with you in Rockland” appears often in Howl, but Ginsberg and Solomon never met there. They met at the New York Psychiatric Institute in 1949 where Solomon was a patient and Ginsberg was visiting his mother, also a patient. Solomon was a bit miffed about the misapprehension, saying that it “garbles history.” It’s likely that Ginsberg used “Rockland” simply because for the fit and rhythm of it. (The Rockland Institute is also where the Netflix series Orange is the New Black was filmed.) Reines said of Rockland “It was a place they turned humans // Into cattle.”
Nietzsche said, “The poets; they lie too much.” When Reines writes “I hate metaphor,” you can’t help but roll your eyes. While many of her poems certainly are direct (and a few times even plain), she does make ample use of metaphor throughout The Rose. “Nectar rises in the sage / Montmorillonite.” Montmorillonite is a clay used in drilling to bring oil out of the earth to the surface (and keep the drill bit cool). Reines is referring to nectar brought from the earth by poetry and her poem closes with “Bitch this is nature / Shake your book at someone else.” She can be pretty adept at simile as well: “a table of men // Poring over their cards like nuclear // Physicists on a deadline.” (Poker players in a casino.)
Reines hails from Salem, Massachusetts—the home of the infamous 17th century witch trials. “I am sure that Salem’s history has influenced me in every way,” Reines said in a 2012 interview with Casey McAlduff. “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.” Reines makes mention of Thomas Watson, the co-inventor of the telephone who was from Salem, in The Rose as “an excellent spirit medium.” Watson went on a retreat to Combe Martin, England in 1931 to visit Mehar Baba, an Indian spiritual master who claimed to be the total manifestation of God in human form. When Baba laid his hand on Watson’s head, Watson wept. That night he said, “In my seventy-eight years of life, today is the first time I have experienced what divine love is.” Watson had always had an interest in the paranormal, sometimes conducting seances and claiming that he sometimes heard “disembodied voices.” That interest spurred his search for ways to transmit the human voice over distance. (Watson saw Alexander Graham Bell as a visionary teacher.) Reines sums up Salem’s women’s interest in the devil with “Probably the reason women are still attracted to the devil // & will always be is that’s who fucked us // Originally.” That’s a nice subtle in-line/end-line rhyme, she doesn’t use it often enough in this collection.
The collection’s final poem is a massive 19 page poem caroming from topic to topic and sometimes descending into nonsense. One will sigh wearily when seeing the length of the poem, but as it progresses it becomes irresistible and just the slightest bit charming. Her favorite mythological Greeks are mentioned again and she even randomly brings up Aristotle: “Did you know Aristotle / Was famously ugly?” Aristotle was of course not famously ugly, maybe not even ugly at all (was she thinking of Socrates?), but Aristotle did infamously say that ugly people can not be happy. For the first time in the book, Reines gets quotidian in this final poem by shoehorning in that Joni Mitchell’s records are back on Spotify. For the third time in the book she brings up her UTI. Reines is nothing if not candid and vulnerable.
The Rose is Reines’s fifth book of poetry. Her collection The Cow won the 2006 Alberta Prize and her collection A Sand Book was awarded the Kinglsey Tufts Prize. NPR’s Michael Silberblatt calls Reines “one of the crucial voices of her generation.” (Reines was born in ’82, making her an elder Millennial). She graduated summa cum laude from Barnard and says for a while she snuck her mother and brother into her dorm room during an episode of homelessness. In one of her poems titled “Correction” she asks “If our fathers // & mothers loved us right // Would we need to write // At all?” Maybe this is what Silberblatt was thinking of when he says voice of a generation.
Hugh Blanton‘s latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
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