The Rose: Poems [Paperback]

In/The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines navigates the intersection of power and surrender.
Drawing on the history of/ romance as the troubadours knew it and the titular flowers ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind. In these poems, inherited ideologies of/gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speakers understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in/The Rose/is wry and bare,/approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role/of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to/uncover the secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love, and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

The Rose,Reiness fifth and most captivating full-length collection, is all about bodies (historical, mythical, or contemporary). . . .What makesThe Roseso pleasurable is that femininityand gender at largeis not fixed, nor starved, of its personal needs. In a world overflowing with suffering, there is no want too great, too silly (or maybe it is, but who cares?) for Reiness narrator. It feels like a radical act of pleasure.Hannah Bonner,The Poetry Foundation

Ariana Reines's poetry is what happens when the goddess comes to earth. When ancient mysteries intersect with the effluvia of human life. Nothing is more humbling or unbelievable than the ordinary humanity of an icon. In The Rose, suffering is erotic and exhausting. Love is plƒW