About the Author

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, 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).

Reviews

"Though never self-conscious, the book is always self-aware, and manages to make fun of the things it clearly feels very earnest and vulnerable about. It's about all the things you don't want out of a relationship--a guy who cuts out American Apparel advertisements and tapes them to his wall, a girl who breaks into your email account--but still, it feels like a powerfully nailed thesis arguing for the existence of love."--Tova Benjamin, Rookie"Ariana Reines' Coeur de Lion makes me want to drink and have sex. Not frilly drinks but hard strong liquor, and not just any sex, but the stuff of human explosions. Her poems, woven and connected from beginning to end, offer up an altar full of lustful interactions--classroom, bathroom, hotel and tree-hugging encounters, and the push-pull of an affair doomed to end in flames."--Liz Axelrod, The Rumpus"It has some of the poignancy of Dickinson's "Master" letters, as we witness a fiercely intelligent and creative woman trying to understand the depth of her feeling for a much less intelligent and less creative man. It has some of the texture of a campus novel, with the couple bombarding each other with books (Bataille, Sebald) and music (Diamanda Galas, Arthur Russell) and ducking out of seminars with Alain Badiou in order to have sex in a bathroom. It is primarily a lyric sequence about an affair, yet the key to the whole may be a long passage about the poet's mother; abrasively coarse at times, it dissects with the finest of scalpels 'the 'you' of poetry, ' the convolutions of lyric's conjuring of the other."--Paul Scott Stanfield, Ploughshares""At one time or another we were sloppy, fragile and young enough to entertain the masochism of unrequited affection. It is only from our present vantage point, Reines reminds us in 95 breathless pages, that you know what the real thing feels like."--Claire Lambrecht, Slate"[Reines] zooms through her ruminations in steeply enjambed blocks of sentences she doesn't even stop to title, making the whole book a single, long poem one can race through in a sitting. This speed gives Coeur de Lion a kind of chatty urgency: there's so much to say, and no time to waste. And Reines makes her poetic manipulation explicit: 'I am writing this / In order to lose you / For my own purposes.' If Coeur de Lion is a confession, it's not just about psychology, but about the violence lyric exerts when it reduces experience into the supposedly universalizing but ultimately 'closed / System of another person's mind.'...The identity Jake assigns Ariana, the "pretentious gypsy Jewess goth," ends up helping Reines--whose book cover, it should be noted, is in a gothic font--to strike back."--Megan Pugh, Rain Taxi"Ariana Reines' Coeur de Lion is many things--hip, pretentious, a bit self-conscious, maybe even a little affected; and, with its references to gmail, MP3s, jpgs and YouTube, contemporary with a capital C. At the same time, it's vulnerable, sincere, tender, ironic, angry, sexual and sad. In a word, it's great. Utterly human in its emotional and intellectual complexity."--Justin Marks, Black Ocean"What attracted me to her at first was what most people have fallen in love with: her candidness about sex and being a woman, defying gender norms with an aggressiveness that combines beauty and ugliness: 'We know our intelligence will betray the clits of sorrow that shudder and jerk off the last of the day.' In Reines' work women are made more fully human by her inclusiveness of the dark side of human nature, in ways that are often funny. I experienced this humor first hand at a recent off-site reading at AWP where Reines demanded that the curtain that separated the room where she was reading and the room full of loud, drunk hipsters to be shut. 'Close the curtain!' she yelled. 'Or I will throw a temper tantrum.' In the stifling fire of her generous narcissism, Reines burns the shit of her experience into gold."--Erica Anzalone, Interim