Sandra Simonds Reads Ariana Reines's A Sand Book

Poet Sandra Simonds takes a look at Ariana Reines's A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019) for Harvard Review. "Like Reines’s earlier collections, the poems in A Sand Book examine the relationships between the female body, intimacy, technology, and pornography, but the mood here is far darker," writes Simonds. More:

...Many of the poems meander, recalling early John Ashbery poems such as “Clepsydra” and “The Skaters.” Others are succinct and precise. All have a gnostic quality produced by a pervasive feeling of dislocation, alienation, and exile—the feeling that one can never fully belong in this world, or even inside one’s own mind. The inner life, the bedrock of art and poetry, is being colonized by the endless technological and psychological demands of our hyper-capitalist era. In “The Saddest Year of My Life,” the speaker, in a desperate situation, finds herself “crouching over [her] phone / waiting for it to tell [her] what to do.” But neglecting an inner life that is too difficult to face or, alternately, living in a world that simply fractures attention to the point that the inner life can’t survive only results in a new form of psychic misery. Why, for example, is the speaker sending tweets about Duke Ellington when her mom is being evicted? By the end of the poem, her response is simply to put her device back in her pocket and keep walking. Walking into what? Probably more of the same.

The journeys—physical and psychological—described in A Sand Book are difficult and painful, but they are punctuated with humor. In “Hegeling Before the Glass,” for example, Reines writes about the “Logic of the world robbing you of your boner.” The speaker of “Open Fifths” declares that “I just watched a Tony Robbins video / You may judge this a counterrevolutionary gesture.” The speaker moves through scholarly interests as rapidly as she does through continents, giving the book a nowhere-to-run feeling: “I had studied the Dust Bowl, the architecture at Delphi, Judaic & Islamic legends of Moses, Midianite theology, the History of Haiti, Aryan horseman of ancient Iran, the collapse of Sumerian agriculture, Kundalini yoga, Allan Savory’s & competing theories on desertification reversal …” The catalog continues, yet the speaker’s studies do not bring her closer to an adequate response to our present moment. Not that she ever really thought they would: “There are things not found in books / or perhaps you have been reading the wrong ones.”

No matter where the speaker of A Sand Book travels, she is bleeding...

Read on at Harvard Review.