Wave of Blood. Ariana Reines. Divided Publishing, 2025. 200 pages.

I’ve never met Ariana Reines.  Not in person, that is—as an early member of her Invisible College community, I’ve talked to her on Zoom, and we’ve exchanged an email or two.  But I’ve never met her in quote unquote real life.  I don’t know why.  It’s not for lack of opportunity. Reines is in constant motion—if you follow her Instagram, or if you subscribe to her newsletter, it can feel like she’s everywhere (New York!  LA!  Amsterdam!  Bucharest!  Paris!) all at once, a one-woman electron cloud of readings, performances, lectures, talks.

And it’s certainly not for lack of interest.  For me, Reines is one of the most exciting poets currently writing.  When she’s writing in a confessional mode, her speakers take on the force of auditory hallucination—specters terrifyingly naked (in a way that approaches the sublime through the back door, by way of sheer abjection) that seem somehow to speak from inside of you, even as they themselves seem to turn themselves inside out.  (Eversion, passing show.)  When she’s doing social commentary, she does so with a Beckettish alloy of cussedness and vulnerability and doomed awareness of her own complicity.  Most of the time—always?—she is doing both.  That porousness between private and public is a large part of her appeal.  An Ariana Reines book is a heady, combustible mixture, an aerosol of powdered magnesium and dried blood.  You get the feeling that your own rejected thoughts have been returned to you as rocket fuel.

Wave of Blood, published last October by Divided Publishing, is no exception—although it is, I think, a departure.  Reines’s previous work, A Sand Book (2019), ends with a section that recalls both Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island” and St. Augustine’s Neo-Platonist vision in the Confessions, in which Reines purports to transcribe words given to her by the sun, in a mystical experience (albeit a mystical experience framed by the narrator’s recollection of the “‘bliss’ [she] heard about in old books”)

"of love, of such ravishing totality […] of a magnitude so enormous there was no way to undermine or deny it.  There was no way to see around it and no desire for anything but to be filled with it."

On the surface, at least, this is an account of an experience so singular and so private that it annihilates the self: the poet’s voice disappears altogether, replaced by the voice of the cosmos.

Wave of Blood, in contrast, is largely in Reines’ own voice, or at least the version of her voice that she uses in her public life.  It is a travelogue, an essay, a collection of lectures—written “between the Libra and Aries Eclipses” of October 2023 and April 2024, largely while Reines was on tour in Europe, the book compiles poems, prose, and transcripts from public speaking.  If A Sand Book was a kind of conversion narrative, Wave of Blood is very nearly a book of sermons.  The sacrament is catharsis, in both the original bodily sense and in the literary/Aristotelian/metaphorical sense: as she writes, Reines says, she is “bleeding,” as if there were “too much meaning for words.”  But it is catharsis functioning as social and civic good; as medicine rather than aesthetics—catharsis that seeks to return the body to its own best and natural rhythm. The first words in the book are “a tortured soul can have social value”; the book closes with a exhortation for poets to work the “hot ore” of the present, to shape the future, to “start building it before the bad stuff is over,” to know that there is “organ-pink light / More life than we know what to do with.”

Throughout Wave of Blood, Reines seeks to “wrestl[e] with the mind of war,” and to “purge [herself] of suffering.”  The suffering she is trying to purge is personal: Reines’s mother, Dr. Sandra Reines, a doctor who struggled with schizophrenia and homelessness for two decades, and who is the animating spirit of much of Reines’s work, died shortly before Reines started writing the book.  The suffering is also collective: Reines’s mother’s suffering, as she points out numerous times, stemmed in part from the inherited trauma of the Holocaust.  The same trauma is also one of the root causes of the current slaughter in Palestine, a kind of “insane reality” in which Reines sees “ancestral grief and ancestral nightmare, ancestral evil also, coming back to roost.”  This is a world that is, as Athanasius Kircher said, bound in occult knots.  What Reines proposes is that the substance of those knots—the fibre of the rope, which is history—is pain. Pain passed down through womb and womb and blood from mother and mother’s mother.  Pain that, unaddressed, clots and hardens the heart and arms it for war, with “self-animosity, loathing, loneliness, shittiness, insanity,” in order to inflict more pain.  If we are to undo those knots and remake the world, pain must be purified, history “transmuted.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Wave of Blood is primarily didactic in tone: Reines may preach, but she is almost never preachy.  She is trying to avoid “hardening [her] speech into the eroticized militancy of the noble freedom fighter.”  She may open the book by suggesting that she is performing “field surgery” on herself to create an “operating theater” that is a “pedagogical space,” but her real business here (and I think always) is ritual, is sacrifice.  In Coeur de Lion (2007) there’s a place where she begins to theorize this—the speaker there is thinking about ways to “exploit the eros of violent possibility,” and begins to talk “about Maya bloodletting rituals” in which people “bled themselves in order to have visions […] pierced their shins, their tongues, their foreskins / with lancets made of stingray spines.”   It is, the speaker says, “impossible to separate  / Blood, architecture, figuration, and / Pain from language itself.”

But where, for Coeur de Lion’s speaker, the vision is the point, the reward for pain, in Wave of Blood, 17 years later, the vision is the point on which the poet impales herself, seeking to transmute the pain of the world.  One specific horror—a small but real horror—of the current war is the endless availability of images that document those horrors.  And a small but real part of this small but real horror, for many of us, is that it paralyzes, isolates, silences.  This is because even a small part of an infinite horror is itself infinite.  And the infinite presses a finger to your lips and says: how dare you speak of me.  Where were you when I made the world.  In August I came across a photograph by the Palestinian photographer Motaz Azaiza.  I could not look at it.  I could not look away from it.  It was like looking into the sun.  It cancelled sight.  It left afterimages, membra disjecta that I saw everywhere I went for days, in the crook of elbows, in the soft hollows of necks, in a red stone dangling from an earlobe, in the Silly String hanging from bushes in Prospect Park.  And I couldn’t speak or write about it, not for a long time.  God, I scribbled, sitting on a bench near Bergen Street: what is any word but blood?  Plague-giver, gourmand of burnt offerings, tell me again how you see each sparrow and keep your silence.

What a relief, then, it was to find my experience mirrored in “Absolute Zero,” the first poem in Wave of Blood:

"I saw a crimson hole

In the delicate skull of a baby

Going gray in the arms of her rescuer

[…]

What I saw I did not know how to see

God almighty if there is a God

You must see it for me"

The thing that poets have always known is that you have to let go of yourself to write.  To say anything worth saying, you have to die. The promise of poetry is that you do not have to die alone.  Words have a mind of their own.  If you put words together in the right order, at the right temperature and density and concentration, in the right medium, they begin to speak to each other, to tangle and coagulate and fold and circle, in the way that proteins fold and tangle together, in the way that neurons stretch out their axons like pleading hands. The mind that all of our words make together is an intelligence that LLMs can only parrot.  It runs with the blood in the veins of readers, it eats the world without destroying it.  It is the only god that I believe in.  In whose mansion there is room for all of us.  Wave of Blood is a stirring call to build that mansion.

Read Wave of Blood, and be washed in it.

Sam Cha was born in Korea.  He earned his MFA at UMass Boston.  A Pushcart Prize winner, he has been published and anthologized widely.  He's the author of American Carnage (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs: 2018), and The Yellow Book ([PANK]: 2020).  Long a resident of Cambridge, MA, he now lives in Brooklyn with his family.