Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines’s A Sand Book (Tin House) is a poetry collection in nine parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, Tweety Bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland to the massacre at Sandy Hook, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, from Attar’s Conference of the Birds to Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls to Twitter, A Sand Book is about change and quantification, the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury, Reines has written her most ambitious work to date, but also her most visceral and satisfying.