Synopses & Reviews
"This astonishing young poet still in her 20s is surely destined to be one of the crucial voices of her generation." Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm
Composed in the direct, accessible, consciousness-piercing style readers of Ariana Reines first two books are wildly enamored of, Mercury comprises a group of long poems. These interlocking works speak to the substance and essence of what is said, transmitted, transacted, "communicated" between persons. Reines proposes that substance and essence are opposites, and explores this in contexts including commercial cinema and internet porn.
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music
Makes me feel lonely
Picking a lemon
Late at night
My heart tightens
I fear nature
Your music makes me feel lonely
I must be responsible for it
I'm alive
have this hair helmet on
I'm so alive
I say yes to the megaplex
You say it's awful isn't it awful
I say yeah
So what. Something sentimental
This place
I agree
Huge
We're gonna go into the movie
...
The day is long enough
The day is long enough
The day is so long enough
To contain all this and more
Synopsis
Ariana Reines returns with more of her elegant, blisteringly direct attention to culture, lovers, and the deep image.
About the Author
Ariana Reines was born in Salem, Massachuestts. She studied French and English at Barnard College, graduating Summa Cum Laude, with many scholarships and prizes, including awards for writing, translation, and the study of Chaucer. She worked in restaurants, dungeons, bars, galleries, and street fairs, and was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and at The European Graduate School, studying literature, performance, and philosophy with Sylvère Lotringer, Antoine Compagnon, Claire Denis, Giorgio Agamben, and many others. (ABD)
Her books include The Cow (Alberta Prize: Fence 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007), Save the World (Mal-O-Mar: 2010; Fence (Audio): 2011), and the forthcoming Mercury (Fence: 2011). She has given readings across the United States and in France, poems have been anthologized in Against Expression (Dworkin + Goldsmith, eds) and Gurlesque (Glenum + Greenberg, eds), and her books have been reviewed, and other writings featured, on KCRW's Bookworm, the UK's The DotPod, and in The Fader, Flaunt, the Boston Review, RainTaxi, Soft Targets, LIT, BOMBlog, WebConjunctions, HTML GIant, and in many other places.
Telephone, her first play, was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and produced in February 2009 at The Cherry Lane, with Obie wins for the production's director and leading actress. Inspired by Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book and the structure of James Joyce's "Exiles", the production received glowing reviews from Ben Brantley in The New York Times, as well as in international papers like The Guardian and Financial Times; it was cited in the New Yorker and The Village Voice as one of 2009's favorite plays. A re-imagining of Telephone's second act was featured alongside other writing by Ariana in the Works+Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in Fall 2009. Telephone was published in PLAY: A JOURNAL OF PLAYS in 2010.
In 2009, she was Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at UC Berkeley, the youngest person ever to hold that position. She has also taught at Columbia University, and The European Graduate School, with visits and master classes at Pomona College, UC Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh.
Ariana also translates from the French. Volumes of translation include The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig (Semiotext(e): 2009), My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire (Mal-O-Mar: 2009), and the forthcoming Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the YoungGirl (Working Title) by the TIQQUN collective (Semiotext(e): 2012), as well as shorter works by Alain Badiou, Pierre Guyotat, and Tony Duvert.
In Spring 2010 she traveled to Haiti twice, working in the Port-au-Prince area with children through The Association for Trauma Outreach and Prevention, and later in medical and supply logistics, with Materials Management Relief Corps. A Vodou initiate, she is now exploring the relation between Vodou ritual and Greek tragedy, among other things.