My name is Ariana Reines. I was born in Salem, Massachusetts. Sun in Scorpio, Aries Rising, Taurus Moon. . I am the author of 4 acclaimed books of poetry, including THE COW (Alberta Prize 2006), COEUR DE LION, MERCURY, and A SAND BOOK, which won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. I wrote the Obie-winning play TELEPHONE (2009) and have created performances for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Swiss Institute, Stuart Shave / Modern Art, Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne, & many more, & have taught poetry at UC Berkeley (Holloway Lecturer), Columbia, NYU, Naropa, Yale, HEAD (Geneva) & for beloved community organizations like The Poetry Project & Poets House. I am the translator of TIQQUN’s PRELIMINARY MATERIALS FOR A THEORY OF THE YOUNG-GIRL, Jean-Luc Hennig’s THE LITTLE BLACK BOOK OF GRISELIDIS RÉAL, and Baudelaire’s MY HEART LAID BARE. . My work brought to poetry a younger & wilder ambition around long-form poetics & the potential of the book, a refusal, inspired by poets like Wanda Coleman & Eileen Myles, to excise or domesticate some of the ironies, much less the volcanic power, of sexuality, & an incisive rhetorical curiosity. The simplest way to describe my work might be: bearing witness to the search for the sacred in the 21st century. My writing describes numinous and ecstatic experience, including theophany, without dismantling the critical apparatus of its intellect, or the often hilarious and absurd nature of reality. I study the effects of digital media upon language, consciousness, and, especially, upon intimacy. The search for a stable ethics, trauma, & the twists & turns of gender & embodiment, show up often in my poems, & I’ve elaborated these themes in collaborations with artists such as the actor and poet Jim Fletcher, sculptor Oscar Tuazon, and currently, multimedia artist Liz Magic Laser. . A Canadian magazine asked me to be a “centrefold”, lol, & there are some things I’ll only do north of the border. This is an outtake 📸