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A Sand Book (Paperback)

A Sand Book by Ariana Reines

Sale Date
ISBN
9781951142162
Page Count
320
Language
English
Dimensions
6 x 9
Imprint
Tin House
Ariana Reines
Longlisted for the National Book Award

"Mind-blowing." ―Kim Gordon

DEADPAN, EPIC, AND SEARINGLY CHARISMATIC, A Sand Book chronicles climate change and climate grief, gun violence and bystanderism, state violence and complicity, mourning and ecstasy, sex and love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, tracking new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times.

A Sand Book
is a poetry collection in twelve parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland to the massacre at Sandy Hook, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, from Attar's “Conference of the Birds” to Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” to Twitter, A Sand Book is about change and quantification, the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. It moves among houses of worship and grocery stores, flitters between geological upheaval and the weird weather of the Internet. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury, Reines has written her most ambitious work to date, but also her most visceral and satisfying.
  • “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. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self.”
    The New York Times
  • “Reines navigates existential calamity as she does literature and language. . . . A Sand Book shows her consciousness at its most expansive and integrated to date. These poems understand nothing so well as their own inevitable incompleteness—that no composition could contain everything, that every history is partial”
    The New Yorker
  • “Reines' wildly rewarding poems are connected through clarity of voice, generous irreverence, and seemingly limitless purview. . . it truly contains multitudes.”
    Booklist, Starred Review

Tin House

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