The New Yorker Reviews Ariana Reines's A Sand Book

Ariana Reines's A Sand Book—and its apocalyptic visions, in particular—are considered in depth at the New Yorker. Reines's subjects "are inseparable from the signs and symbols by which, in our media-glutted moment, they are relentlessly articulated—or, as the case may be, obscured," writes Hannah Aizenman. More:

...If today’s world can seem incomprehensible, so, too, can the ways we discuss it; last week’s news, takes, memes, and trends quickly dissolving into so many ancient runes. “We were lost in a language of images. / It was growing difficult to speak,” Reines writes in the poem “A Partial History”: “Yet talk / Was everywhere.” Amid the chaos, she takes on the role of reluctant oracle or interpreter, dogged by glimpses of revelation, yet hesitant to accept, or impose, any pretense of coherence.

“A Partial History” is a bleak report from the twenty-first century: “Everything we did for our government / And the corporations that served it we did for free / In exchange for the privilege of watching one / Another break down.” The state of crisis Reines describes is, like the state itself, inescapably brutal, exacting a complicity so pervasive it infiltrates the very body: “Our skin was the same wall they talked about on the news / And our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew.” That “the dominant / Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing,” is characterized by hostility and exploitation is but one of that (read: this) age’s cruel ironies. Do all of our efforts at expression—the selfies, ads, gifs, emojis, avatars, and icons that comprise our shared “language of images”—illuminate the truth of our time, or confound it? If language is a technology—prone, like any other, to weaponization or obsoletion—will ours lead us out of dystopia, or only further into it, winding up an arcane relic of some fallen civilization? “A Partial History” concludes:

The images gave us no rest yet failed over

And over despite the immensity

Of their realism to describe the world as we really

Knew it, and worse, as it knew us

In “A Sand Book,” capitalism’s parasitic effect on discourse mirrors its ransacking of the environment; Reines ties cultural and spiritual desiccation to literal desertification...

Read the full review at the New Yorker.