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  • The Rose: Poems by Ariana Reines book cover
  • The Rose: Poems by Ariana Reines book cover
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The Rose: Poems

by Ariana Reines

Desire, power, and inherited symbols

$19.98 USD
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AlbakiReads Editorial

Desire, power, and inherited symbols

Ariana Reines’s poems bring the history of troubadour romance into conversation with the rose’s long-standing associations with sexuality and mystery. Across that symbolic terrain, the collection examines how gendered ideas of power and surrender shape understandings of suffering, desire, and the soul. Its subjects include erotic love and spirituality, as well as war, maternity, violent sensuality, and language’s place in magical acts. The poems also turn toward vulnerability as a way of reconsidering inherited gender roles, holding tenderness and danger in the same frame.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in contemporary American poetry engaging with romance and the symbolism of the rose.
  • Readers exploring gender, desire, power, and vulnerability in poetry.
  • Readers drawn to poetry connecting erotic love, spirituality, war, and maternity.

Themes

Power and surrenderGender and vulnerabilityRomance and symbolismErotic love and spiritualityLanguage and magic

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Book overview

In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines navigates the intersection of power and surrender.
Drawing on the history of "romance" as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower's ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: "I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind." In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker's understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the "secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love," and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

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