Ariana Reines
“People have different kinds of understandings of form and structure and accuracy. This is especially true of an art like poetry, which is so liquid. It can be about anything, it can take any form, and you don’t have to pay anybody for equipment. There’s absolutely no restriction on it. So because of that, it has to do certain things if it’s going to last.”
“Mind-blowing.”
“Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention.”
“Reines’ wildly rewarding poems are connected through clarity of voice, generous irreverence, and seemingly limitless purview . . . it truly contains multitudes”
“Reines’s new book is longer, more complex, and in ways more ambitious than her two previous books. Mercury is still gritty and first-person, but it’s the “Aria” in Ariana, it’s 239 pages into infinity, on winged heels and a prayer. It’s alchemy achieved, and so vital as to exemplify poetry today in its guttural full glory.”
Named one of Flavorwire's 100 best living writers and "a crucial voice of her generation" by KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt, Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator.
Her books include A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize & longlisted for the National Book Award.
Other books include The Cow (Alberta Prize, 2006), Coeur De Lion (2007), and Mercury (2011), all from Fence Books, and The Origin of the World (2014) from Semiotext(e). Her Obie-winning play Telephone (2009) was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and has been performed and published in Norwegian translation at the Mollebyen Literary Festival (2017) and at KW Berlin (2018) among others.
Recent commissions include Possession (2023), a major sculpture & performance collaboration with Liz Magic Laser, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, and Divine Justice (2022), a 24-hour theatrical environment at Performance Space New York.
Reines’ performances & theatrical works include: Mortal Kombat (2015), commissioned by Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne & performed at The Whitney Museum, New York, NY, USA, and Gallery TPW, Toronto, CA, and Lorna (2013) at Martin E. Segal Theatre, New York, USA, both in collaboration with Jim Fletcher, The Origin of the World (2013) at Modern Art, London UK, and many others. Art exhibitions include Pubic Space (2016), a collaboration with Oscar Tuazon at Modern Art in London, UK, Exhaust (2016) at Contemporary Art Tasmania, AU, and Jane Dark (2014) at Western Front, Vancouver, Canada.
Reines is the translator of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (Mal-O-Mar, 2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (Semiotext(e) 2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young Girl (Semiotext(e) 2012).
In 2022, Reines is Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Wichita State University and the Mary Routt Chair in Literature at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She has taught poetry at Columbia University, the European Graduate School, NYU, Tufts, Naropa, The New School, Yale & many others, and has also taught workshops at beloved community organizations including The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church and Poets House. In 2009 Reines was Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley, her first-ever job teaching poetry.
Her poetry, essays, & interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Believer, The Boston Review, Bomb, Granta, Harpers, The Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY, & more. She has composed texts for many artists, including Nicole Eisenman, Seth Price, Justine Kurland, Liz Larner, Anna Sew Hoy, Carol Rama, Mondongo, and Sanya Kantarovsky.
Reines has been a MacDowell Fellow, a resident at the TS Eliot House, a fellow at The Center for the Humanities at Tufts, a Brown Foundation Fellow at the Dora Maar House, the Poetry Fellow at the University of East Anglia, has judged the National Poetry Series, The White Review Poetry Prize and been a nominator for the Foundation for Contemporary Art.
In 2012 she created Ancient Evenings, an innovative platform generating creative writing through ancient texts, as well as Lazy Eye Haver, an astrology practice through which she practiced new forms of arts and consciousness pedagogy. In March 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, she created Invisible College, a hub for poetry, art, and sacred study online.
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