Mouth to Mouth

after Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,

and after 웅녀, the first Korean mother, 

who was a bear

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.

During the pandemic, I (Sam Cha, yours truly) heard–probably from Suzanne Mercury, a wonderful poet I know mostly from the Boston Poetry Marathon–that Ariana Reines had started a Zoom community/group/”study hall” called Invisible College, in which people were getting together to read an eclectic mix of myth and poem.  All around me the world was a homogenous mush of dread and boredom and contagion and paranoia and anger–a kind of death porridge.  Sign me up, I said. 

The Zoom meetings for Invisible College became a kind of lifeline for me, and probably for everyone there, Ariana included.  Many lifelines, then, criss-crossed and woven together.  A net that helped free us. 

Recently, I had the chance to have the following conversation with Ariana, via email and Google Doc, about her new book, Wave of Blood.

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SC: This hadn’t quite consciously registered with me until I was reviewing Wave of Blood, but it seems to me that a lot of your work can be read at least in part as travelogue.  You have an affinity with the epic–in Wave of Blood you talk about teaching Milton, and I first got to know you when you were teaching The Descent of Inanna.  I was wondering whether you could talk more here about your relationship with epic journeys that are also katabatic descents into the twinned structures of the universe and the soul?  And how that feeds into Wave of Blood?

AR: You’re right.  All of my work– maybe beginning with A Sand Book (2019)?-- has been travelogue.

The epic mode, at least as it was first taught to me, involves men setting off on boats– going to war, or going in search of the father.  The feminine epic does seem to involve both ascent and descent, as we discovered with Inanna: she structures and crafts the realm in which she comes to reign, the middle realm.  Having brought the me down from heaven she establishes a new order, then goes to the underworld to be stripped of every single power and honor she has acquired for herself.

I guess we might suggest then that the Greek epic and the Sumerian tradition have travel in common: these poems require that their heroes go somewhere.  I feel like Eileen Myles, in The Importance of Being Iceland, though they don’t personally write much in the epic mode, has created in and of themselves a kind of epic hero, the figure of the poet out in public, moving across and through the world, and they’ve been a big inspiration and comfort to me in my journeying.

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SC: And maybe a bit about the way we structure our own lives as epic?  What are some things that you get out of your life, if you read it as epic; what are some things to look out for; what wolf and what leopard and what Anzu-bird?

AR: It helps to have a form to refer to.  It helps, when you feel like life is turning you inside out, ripping you apart, etc, to refer your soul’s torments and confusions to a structure with enough vigor in it to give you the courage you need to pass from one ordeal to the next.  I think this is one of the real functions of poetry: it makes a place for us where no place exists, it names and somehow dignifies aspects of reality normative thought does not know how to name, or what to do with.

My sense from what I’ve been learning from Inanna is that wolves, leopards, and Anzu-birds just naturally show up.  That when we make a decision and take action in our lives, good things and people arrive, helpers and lovers and friends, and also riff raff, squatters, thieves, and randos– it’s natural.  Some decisiveness and pluck is required of us if we’re ever going to build something, and yet, if we’re going to remain poets, we also have to be willing to lose everything, to go into the bowels of the earth the way Inanna– but also Dante, Persephone, Prometheus, so many others– do….

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SC: Part of the structure of the travelogue is the return–if not to the place of origin, a place that mirrors and betters it.   A home.  You’ve spent a lot of your life, as you say in Wave of Blood, feeling like you couldn’t have a home.  I’m wondering whether that has changed for you, or is changing, even as you strive for “a mind that abides nowhere”?

AR: You know what’s wild Sam?  I swear I didn’t plan this– couldn’t possibly have planned it.  But two weeks ago I moved back to Queens, which is where the home was that I gave up while writing A Sand Book, because I couldn’t live with myself letting my mom end up on the streets again (even though, eventually, she did end up on the streets again.)

It’s a thought I’ve held in the most delicate and private way lately– a very quiet but somehow epic feeling of homecoming.  Thank you for asking me that.

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SC: One thing that’s really hard to capture, in any review of your work, is the dynamic between sincerity and irony.  I don’t know whether those are even the right terms.  I’m thinking here of the MOSAIC section of A Sand Book, in which you are recounting a real mystical experience, but at the same time it is also framed as something learned, something analogous to “the ‘bliss’ [...] heard about in old books.”  It’s so subtle, that layer of artifice, and that subtlety is one of the many things I admire about your work.

I don’t know whether what I’m trying to say is completely clear.  Maybe an analogy is the way to go–although, as you point out, it is an “imprecise mechanism.”  But often I read your work and what I experience is like a kind of exploded diagram of myth and representation of myth–there’s the real Lucia who is gouging out her own eyes, and there is the saint, sublimed into story, who does so without pain or compunction, and there’s the icon of Santa Lucia, calmly holding out her own eyes on a platter, as if to say well, do you want this or not?  What do you make of it?  And the thing is, your poems are all of those at the same time–pain and story and emblem, grief and rage and love given “form [...] and formality” is how you put it, early in Wave of Blood.

I’m wondering whether it was harder to maintain that level of control in Wave of Blood, given that large parts of the book are based on transcripts of your public speaking?  Could you tell us a bit about the process of putting the book together, and of structuring it?  How was it different from the experience of putting together A Sand Book?  Or, since you were writing it just before (?) Wave of Blood, the experience of putting together The Rose?

AR: Sam this is such a beautiful and generous, subtle and precise reading that I hesitate to add to it.  I feel such gratitude for it.  But to answer your question, and simply: yes.  It was hard.  Excruciating actually, to maintain control in Wave of Blood.

Speech is sloppy– it’s the spirit behind the words that people receive, so you can use the wrong words, or even somehow flop around them and never even quite say them, but people feel you, and they know what you mean.  Speech has to be edited to satisfy me as a writer– at least mine does– but I tried not to edit all of its sloppiness out, or I’d kill off the best thing about it, which is that speech is alive.

I also gave myself the somewhat insane task of not writing memoir.  Of not writing a memoir of my mother’s suicide.  And not exactly writing a memoir of watching a genocide unfold, while nevertheless feeling that I myself would die if I did not at least try to make a record of both.

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SC: In “Absolute Zero,” the first poem in Wave of Blood, faced with the image of the “crimson hole / In the delicate skull of a baby” your speaker says “I did not know how to see / God almighty if there is a God / You must see it for me.”  And what I get from that is that there is a way in which you’re trying desperately through poetry, through language, “despite its corruptions,” to speak into existence a kind of many-souled, many-bodied one who does know how to see such things.  Who can, in some alembic womb, carry the dead.  This, in opposition to the mind of war, the “mechanistic–machine-like–forces moving across the world,” the latest manifestation of which, for you, is AI, as a “Frankenstein god in its uncontrollable infancy.”  This reminded me a lot of Blake, another poet who learned from Milton: “Milton loved me in childhood & shewed me his face,” he says somewhere.  Milton sounds there almost like a mother for Blake, which makes me think of the part in Wave of Blood where you quote your friend Jaguar Womban, who says that in all of history there is only one womb.  And I was wondering if you could say something about community, about what’s passed down and around from poet to poet, warm and living hand to warm and living hand, across time?  And who (like Milton for Blake, regardless of sex) are your mothers in poetry?

AR: Another astonishingly subtle and generous reading, causing me goosebumps of gratitude.  I think Jaguar’s teaching is masterful and immense: it has the kind of authority of those very few things in life one needs to hear only once to be changed forever.  The word community has been raped, stretched out, and abused almost to death by our political overlords– but there is something quantum in there, something extending from life to life, that stays alive forever in poetry, and my mother’s death really drove this fact home for me.  The poets do not die.  Their poems outlast even the languages they were written in, and certainly they outlast the cultures they were written for (and against).  That is community.  I’ve only experienced it in and through poetry– its living hand is indeed warm and capable, and as ghoulish and absurd as that may sound, it’s a hundred percent real.  We know it because we feel it– Keats reaching toward us, Blake mothering us.  My mothers: definitely the women of the New York School, Generation Two.  Hurston, Deren, Michel André (my father).  Louise Labé, Chaucer, Montaigne, Duras, Pasolini. More mothers: Avital Ronell, Sylvere Lotringe, Michael Silverblatt, Hedi El-Kholti.  Too many to mention.  I would add Chris Kraus but it’s too cloying to call her a mother, though in many ways and for many reasons, I owe her my life.

SC: Thank you so much, again, Ariana, for agreeing to do this interview!