by osmosis

Ariana Reines gets at the murkiness of being human with stunning precision. She’s a young poet, which is important, because she’s lost in the weird, bodiless world of screens and projections that has proliferated over the last two decades. There’s a feeling of distance that she’s wading through, as if writing about what’s outside of herself is the only way to get inside.

Reines’ first book, ‘The Cow,’ published by Fence Books, won the Alberta Prize, and she published her second book, ‘Coeur de Lion’ on Mal-O-Mar, the press she co-founded. She could’ve had it put out by an established publisher, but that would have required waiting until it wasn’t fresh any more. And waiting seems like such a dated thing to do. Her first play, ‘Telephone,’ premiered at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre this past winter.

“I cannot see inside my face because the inside of my face is attached to the seeing that comes out of my face. I cannot see the revelation going on in me because I’m attached to it,” Reines read at the Bower Poetry Club. “But I can read. I can turn my face to something subtle enough to read its way into my interior.”

What I like most about Reines is that everything she writes acknowledges how difficult honesty is:  we can’t see inside ourselves, self-images are absorbed from distant sources, language screws us over because it’s something external that we’re fated to use to understand what’s internal. Yet Reines keeps trying to pin something honest down, and every time she succeeds, I get chills.

“I am harassed,” read Reines at the Bowery. “Tonight, three guys in a car said, ‘Can we help with your hard-on?’ That was the most genderfucked catcall I ever pretended I wasn’t hearing as I walked by it. I am so tired. Deep, deep inside. . . “