This August, a group of researchers, activists, and public officials held a funeral for Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier to “die” as a result of climate change. A memorial plaque was erected addressing posterity: “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
There is something chilling in any attempt to communicate with the eventual inheritors of the planet we are destroying. The challenge is existential (what can we say to them?) as well as practical (in what language should we say it?). At a nuclear-waste repository near Carlsbad, New Mexico, this is more than a thought experiment: the plant’s contents will remain hazardous for thousands of generations. Writers, artists, and sociologists hired by the United States Department of Energy have proposed marking the site with a note carved in granite, in several scripts: “This message is a warning about danger. . . . The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.” Other suggestions have taken a more figurative approach: a version of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”; an array of enormous, menacing stone spikes. There is no dispelling the anxiety, however, that it may not be possible to fully account or atone for what we have wrought. All of these tentative messages speak not only to an uncertain future but also to an uncertain present, and what they convey is that we have no idea how to tell our story. Even if we did, would anyone listen?
“A Sand Book,” the audacious new collection by the poet, playwright, translator, and performance artist Ariana Reines, asks what it means to try to make meaning in the shadow of an end time. The book is a psychedelic epic about climate change and forever war; capitalism and surveillance; gun violence and police brutality; fascism and genocide; diaspora, mental illness, gender, and the occult. These subjects are inseparable from the signs and symbols by which, in our media-glutted moment, they are relentlessly articulated—or, as the case may be, obscured. If today’s world can seem incomprehensible, so, too, can the ways we discuss it; last week’s news, takes, memes, and trends quickly dissolving into so many ancient runes. “We were lost in a language of images. / It was growing difficult to speak,” Reines writes in the poem “A Partial History”: “Yet talk / Was everywhere.” Amid the chaos, she takes on the role of reluctant oracle or interpreter, dogged by glimpses of revelation, yet hesitant to accept, or impose, any pretense of coherence.
“A Partial History” is a bleak report from the twenty-first century: “Everything we did for our government / And the corporations that served it we did for free / In exchange for the privilege of watching one / Another break down.” The state of crisis Reines describes is, like the state itself, inescapably brutal, exacting a complicity so pervasive it infiltrates the very body: “Our skin was the same wall they talked about on the news / And our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew.” That “the dominant / Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing,” is characterized by hostility and exploitation is but one of that (read: this) age’s cruel ironies. Do all of our efforts at expression—the selfies, ads, GIFs, emojis, avatars, and icons that comprise our shared “language of images”—illuminate the truth of our time, or confound it? If language is a technology—prone, like any other, to weaponization or obsoletion—will ours lead us out of dystopia, or only further into it, winding up an arcane relic of some fallen civilization? “A Partial History” concludes:
In “A Sand Book,” capitalism’s parasitic effect on discourse mirrors its ransacking of the environment; Reines ties cultural and spiritual desiccation to literal desertification. In “Haboob,” whose title references the Arabic word for an extreme sandstorm, she diagnoses “Among likers & shamers / The fear of a green planet / Fear of a human planet.” Reines’s lamentations of hollowness and shallowness, mechanization and artifice, belong to an established poetic tradition—“I saw the best minds / I saw the best minds / I saw the best minds,” she intones, the engine of Ginsberg’s “Howl” turning over and over, refusing to start—and part of her frustration is their exhaustion. Over the years, these same complaints have accumulated into so much waste. “How long does it take a revolution to arrive?” she asks. “. . . It had happened / And yet it still hadn’t arrived. It was / An experience of dryness— / ‘An experience of the abyss.’ ” What hope is there for poetry at such an event horizon?
In “A Sand Book,” the threat of annihilation is not just speculative but historical. Reines reckons with patriarchy’s assaults and imperialism’s appetites, as well as more localized atrocities, like the genocidal campaign by ISIS against the Yazidi people, whose mythology provides a recurring motif throughout the book’s twelve sections. She draws her title and epigraph from Paul Celan, who, late in his career, began an untitled poem, “NO MORE SAND ART, no sand book, no masters.” Celan, a Romanian-born poet who survived the Holocaust, troubled notions of bearing witness in poetry, a medium he felt—like his Jewish heritage and the German language in which he wrote—was indelibly traumatized. For Reines, who is descended from survivors, and in whose poetry the Shoah looms large even when not explicitly centered, Celan is a crucial influence, a model of what poet and critic Cathy Park Hong describes as “literature that is lifeblood against the sanctimonious, sanctioned poetry that the establishment uses to exonerate themselves.” Reines, like Celan, is ambivalent about the lyric’s capacity to contain and commute human suffering. In an interview in The White Review, she recently remarked, “I’ve been haunted by the old mode of writing, which I think of as ‘righting’—seeking redemption, somehow, by rendering past events into art; into fiction, into vision, into some form of intellectual lucidity that could somehow free me from the shit of the real.” Or, as she put it more than a decade ago, “Writing can be more than good.”
The journey “A Sand Book” narrates is not a hero’s triumph, then, but something messier, less readily legible. Traversing Central and Eastern Europe, New York, California, the Southwestern U. S., Buenos Aires, and Haiti, Reines resembles a cosmic outlaw, a modern-day wandering Jew, whose errancy and alienation disrupts illusions of order. “I was feeling kind / Of Auschwitzy in a vegan restaurant in Warsaw,” she writes, in “Pilgrims’ Progress,” observing the crass incongruity of “an H&M and a multiplex across the street // From the ghetto wall.” The collection’s first poem, “Desero,” defines the Latin verb—“I forsake / I abandon / I give up”—and the book is, indeed, about desertion, from a “vast unpaid army / Of self-destructors, false comrades, impotent / Brainiacs who wished to appear to be kind.” Defection from the mainstream is preferable to assimilation, and if the proverbial desert does not promise deliverance, it inspires a particular attunement. Out of perilous thirst arise all manner of mirages and visions.
The extreme and hostile conditions of our contemporary environment demand a measure of imperviousness—“Let the record show / I caused my flesh to thicken to protect // What you and your connivances / . . . / Would otherwise have dispersed.” And yet they can also give way to a radical sensitivity. In “Legend,” a barrier between the private self and its surroundings erodes, and a new, communal channel of perception emerges:
Reines navigates existential calamity as she does literature and language—like a sieve or a singing bowl, receiving rather than contriving the patterns and resonances that evoke “the greater, deeper, more horrible / & boundlessly sweeter justice / of the unfathomable whole.”
This intellectual and emotional porousness has defined each of Reines’s previous collections: “The Cow” (2006), “Cœur de Lion” (2007), and “Mercury” (2011) all strive, in their own ways, for a sense of totality. But “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. “Seeing / God hasn’t saved me,” Reines declares, in “Skull & Bones.” “The world keeps forcing / Its way in. ‘The world’ / Which fucking one. / You know the one. / And I was one / Of the lucky ones.”
This tension between the singular and the collective—the solitary grain and the great shifting dune—surfaces most dramatically in the last movement of “A Sand Book.” “Mosaic” records an astral encounter Reines undergoes in a moment of intense vulnerability, even abjection. “The words aren’t ‘mine’,” she explains in a preface to the transmission. “Thoughtforms were being communicated to me whole.” The unmediated utterance delivers a series of sweeping pronouncements, reassuring in their conviction if not necessarily their content: “WE DO NEED EVERY KIND OF STORY,” for example, but “THERE WILL ALWAYS BE THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE DESTRUCTION IN A GIVEN TIME.” Yet “THIS IS WHY THE OTHER WORLD HAS ALWAYS NEEDED TO BE CREATED.” A sort of inverted deus ex machina, more overture than resolution, “Mosaic” is a fitting coda to Reines’s Exodus, reminding that all stories, all times, are simultaneously unique and common, discrete and continuous. Reines reflects that “Sand was the place between two worlds.” In “A Sand Book,” apocalypse becomes an invitation—an imperative—to remember the past and imagine the future, to insist on a promised land that we, like the Old Testament prophet, may finally never enter.
