Ariana Reines, _The Rose_

WRITTEN CONCURRENTLY WITH Wave of Blood, perhaps? The Rose is mentioned a time or two in Wave of Blood, so perhaps it was already finished by October 2023, even though it appeared after Wave of Blood had already been out a few months. If conceived concurrently, they would be fraternal rather than identical twins--a lot in common, but easily told apart.

Reading The Rose reminded me a lot of reading Reines's other collection of poetry--not so much because she revisits material she has written of before (although, yes, she does) as because it conjures that same headlong feeling, that feeling that you had better not stop reading, that there is no way off this roller coaster until it comes to its end. That, and the feeling that you are playing a game of chess with Reines, but she has already finished the game in her head and has already started playing the next game while you are still trying to figure out her moves in this one.

So: familiar material? Yes, in that Reines again writes of her mother and again embraces abjection...that is, somehow, Reines turns being treated badly into a kind of agency, an assertiveness, a claim to power...ehh, that doesn't make any sense. But if it made sense, why would she write about it?

     If our fathers

& mothers loved us right

Would we need to write

At all? If we were more tele-

Pathic as a species

Which we should have

Become by now, let's

Be honest, what would

Become of writing & art

But explosions in the heart

Mansions of great intricacy

We'd create invariably'& constantly

On behalf of one another

With no need of a culture

To transact these things

For us?

Part I seems to come out of the aftermath of a difficult love affair, while Part II seems to be written during the affair, creating the odd feeling that that the difficult affair has already been lived through before it has been experienced. And then Part III is a long poem, "Theory of the Flower," which starts with Molly Bloom (if you have not heard Siobhan McKenna's reading of Molly's soliloquy, you should find it just to hear her say "swimming in roses") and pinballs through Joni Mitchell, Cynthia Nixon, Ezra Pound, and the Roman de la Rose before, in its last four pages...turning into...something utterly...different...and pivoting back to Joyce, only not exactly. Whew. Maybe the best thing she has ever done. 

I have often thought of Reines as a contemporary confessional poet, and I still do, but I am grateful for the clear line she draws on p. 107:

& long ago I made a solemn vow not to go

The way the Confessionals went.
I just don't see my death bringing Justice.