Diana Arterian Reviews Ariana Reines's A Sand Book

Poet and writer Diana Arterian reviews Ariana Reines's new collection, A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), for the New York Times. "Poetry, it seems, offers a means to engage with language again," writes Arterian of the book's first section (out of 12). "At one point Reines asks, rhetorically, 'But why am I trying to talk to you now / In this of all media.'" More:

The answer may lie in this book’s predecessor, “Mercury” (an extended engagement with alchemy, among other things), in which Reines writes, “Poetry’s not made of words.” If Celan despairs of transferring knowledge between people, he also shows how poetry, more than most genres, can sustain unnamable feeling in the reader. Even when a word is ground down to its smallest particles — its vowels, its “glottal stop,” as Celan put it in his most famous poem — the song remains.

With this as a guiding principle, Reines moves through a wide variety of topics, themes, forms and tones. The images can be as specific as visiting her homeless mother at Bellevue (“i felt i was sitting / with a shamed & ruined / god”), or as quotidian as the report of a celebrity breakup. Yet throughout, Reines whips us through emotional states (ecstasy, depression, self-loathing, infatuation), physical locations (Queens, Arizona, Lithuania, Haiti) and forms of communication (diary entries, dreams, couplets, aphorisms) — all to consider what we’re doing to one another. She writes, “Little truths beguiling / And infinitesimal roughnesses diverting one idea / Or the next into matter, glottal stops, fine white.” These beguiling truths are her primary focus here.

Read the full review at the NYT.