Mercury

"Mercury is the smallest planet and the closest to the sun. Mercury, the chemical, is highly toxic, commonly known as Quicksilver, and is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. Mercury in its book form is filled with shimmering poetry that tastes like cotton candy mixed with cum and works as an antidote to the poison of withholding."--Liz Axelrod, Luna Luna"The opening poems invoke the transportive powers of alchemy's masters--Hermes, Artemis, Rozenkreutz, Nicholas Flamel. Alchemical symbols illustrate short spell-poems like 'EMAIL/SORROW/MOON" and "FUMES/POWDER/ESSENCE, ' which are crisp and evocative counterpoints to longer pieces that come at the truth from crazily varied directions with language that's sometimes lyrical, sometimes trashy and plainspoken."--Marietta Abrams, The Brooklyn Rail"Inside, five sections span a brain-wide collision of worlds, including web porn, alchemy, art, America, action movies, fucking, S&M, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Leonard Cohen, childbirth, money...There is enormous spirit here, a rising and resizing; the machine of it is awake, operating both in a time where we can talk about jacking off on the internet in one breath and slaves or the myths of old gods in another. It is both destructive and perseverant, pissed off and giving."--Blake Butler, Vice"The poems braid names and myth, identity and otherness, everyday lives and those of the saints, substance abuse and the brutalities of the body expressed in language. Reines' style is darkly surreal, sometimes humorous and viciously crisp, even at the point in which a line turns florid, a blankness decadent....Sometimes a line just sounds like a song, or a spell. I read this book all the time, to practice a kind of summoning of my elsewhere self."--Maria Sledmere, Glasgow Review of Books"This collection, Mercury, for me is the apotheosis of Reines's output and voice. You can read it like it's a novel, turning pages until you get to the end, building a sense in your mind of the funny, gorgeous, odd, dirty, gnostic visions of one female gaze."--Rachel Kushner, Vulture"The sense of crisis in the nested, cosmic Mercury impinges on the poet's being through many occasions (relentless male catcalling, history, bad films, sex, pornographic Gchat transcripts), but its ultimate origin remains occluded, doubtful. What is not in doubt is that the world needs saving and that the powers to save it reside in images of nature and may be released through incantation and inscription: phrases are repeated even more often than in the prior books, and the central section of the book revolves around actual (meaning non-alphabetic) alchemical hieroglyphs."--Frank Guan, n+1"Her poems contain no trace of religiosity or theological hope, and she mentions sacred agendas with comic deflation ('I would be a Catholic in New Jersey if I could'). Glib and garrulous, she traverses hyper-charged realms where contemporary verse culture crosses with Internet pornography, medieval literature, performance art, popular media, and cultural theory, yet beneath all the mess is an intense striving that is hard to pin down, the yearning of a solitary soul in extremis...Reines augurs a new direction in contemporary poetry--a disturbing, contradictory offbeat breach of cool that verges on the uncanny."--BK FIscher, Boston Review"Mercury is a book of passion that is filled with a unique magic. Though Reines' work is hard to contextualize in the world of academic poetry, her aesthetic has been compared to Picasso (by Kevin Killian), Schwerner (by Mike McDonough), and her fellow Fencer Catherine Wagner, with whom she shares an intelligent, bawdy sense of womanhood. Whatever her artistic lineage may be, in Mercury Ariana Reines brews a deft poetic voice that creates for itself an elixir of life, and a way to write poetry 'that is not made of words.'"--Casey McAlduff, Mary: A Journal of New Writing