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77th out of 98 books
—
40 voters
Coeur de Lion
by
Ariana Reines (Goodreads Author)
Now that I am not addressing you But the you” of poetry I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this I” is the I of poetry And it should be able to do more than I can do.
Just a few months after the publication of her prize-winning, instant classic debut The Cow, Ariana Reines self-published this stunning book-length poem, now a cult object among reade
...morePaperback, 108 pages
Published
March 14th 2008
by Mal-O-Mar
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451)
I DEVOURED this book as soon as I pulled it out of the POBox! LUCKILY I didn't have to go to my stupid job and could sit in the park and READ READ READ IT with all the pain and pleasure it deserves having when read!
So many unexpected FREAKISH, BEAUTIFUL moments it's hard to put a finger to it. Here's one particular moment (JUST WHEN sex in poems was getting redundant and boring THIS SUCH STANZA):
I did it a few
Times when I was
Eighteen. My hole
Is just another
Hole in the world
I said in my head
My ho...more
So many unexpected FREAKISH, BEAUTIFUL moments it's hard to put a finger to it. Here's one particular moment (JUST WHEN sex in poems was getting redundant and boring THIS SUCH STANZA):
I did it a few
Times when I was
Eighteen. My hole
Is just another
Hole in the world
I said in my head
My ho...more
Aug 06, 2008
Ana
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
anyone who ever thought contemporary poetry was unexciting. read it and weep
Ariana Reines wrote the best book of the year, and 2009 will have to work hard to top this, and hell, most other years too. Coeur de Lion isn't just 'great,' it's Great. Read it, talk about it, spread the word!
I liked this much more than "The Cow." The self-consciousness, while still present, is to a lesser and more productive degree. "Coeur de Lion" is basically about a love affair gone awry between the poet and one "Jake". It takes us through the poet's graduate school in Europe and some time in New York. She is poor and she and Jake have a lot of non-vanilla sex and she goes through his email account and pisses him off. Both have other lovers at home while they are in Europe (are they both cheating...more
A single long poem or a series of poems with no discernible boundaries, about a love affair. The book is coversational, but urgent, the words tumble over each other desperately so that suddenly you look up and you've read forty pages.
"Ariana" pines after and also kind of disdains and also kind of loathes and also kind of tenderly cares for her love object, "Jake", who has been writing emails to "Emma", a girl who is clever but simple, pretty, infinitely more manageable than the narrator, whom...more
"Ariana" pines after and also kind of disdains and also kind of loathes and also kind of tenderly cares for her love object, "Jake", who has been writing emails to "Emma", a girl who is clever but simple, pretty, infinitely more manageable than the narrator, whom...more
Voice? I felt like she was sitting talking to me. To borrow a word from one of my favorite sources; "Unbestopable!"
I’ve been reading Ariana Reines lately. I am a regular-ish listener to Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm show and it was there I discovered Ariana Reines. (Listen to the show www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw080424..., Ms. Reines gives a killer reading, though there is a fair amount of ‘bleeping’ - f*cking FCC!) Her latest work, the slender but whollup-packing “Coeur de Lion” amazes and delights and saddens and everything else, unfurling much like a Chinese Scroll Painting- linear in composition, but...more
I just read the new Fence version and it was full of startling moments and bare-ass naked truth. This is one of those books (along with other "personal" poetic volumes like Ghost Machine and Greg Sherl's I Have Touched You) that was the perfect thing for me to read right now. Raunchy, sexy, confessional beauty. Can't wait to read more of her work and to see her read one day. I've heard that her readings are crazed!
They fucked instead of listening to Badiou, and then she listened to Badiou. They broke up, but it felt like a bigger and smaller thing. The conclusion of this affected relationship is an inventory of books borrowed, bought, and loaned, and we realize here the combinations of body and text, their absent boundaries, facilitators of exchange.
This book is colossal even though it is a slim volume of lyric poetry.
e.g. -
"Where is the "you" of You/ Tube."
--
"Arthur Rimbaud"
--
"When I am straddling you, you/ Say this ridiculous thing, Mamma /
Llama."
really really colossally intellectually painfully tangibly believably superlatively fantastically good.
e.g. -
"Where is the "you" of You/ Tube."
--
"Arthur Rimbaud"
--
"When I am straddling you, you/ Say this ridiculous thing, Mamma /
Llama."
really really colossally intellectually painfully tangibly believably superlatively fantastically good.
um.
can i just say that i wanted to post every single fucking line on my blog?
this book broke my heart.
so glad i saw her read, because
this shit
when dickinson says you know it's poetry when it lops the top of your head off?
yeah.
maybe had this happen twice with other poets.
I will hoard all of Reines' works now.
thanks,
<3
can i just say that i wanted to post every single fucking line on my blog?
this book broke my heart.
so glad i saw her read, because
this shit
when dickinson says you know it's poetry when it lops the top of your head off?
yeah.
maybe had this happen twice with other poets.
I will hoard all of Reines' works now.
thanks,
<3
William Gass calls the sentence a unit of consciousness, and the sentences here, splintered into lines of verse, navigate between self-analysis, self-pity, self-revelation, self-delusion. Maybe one of life's fundamental conflicts is between the way you know yourself to be, and the way others see you?
Of course, that's the province of the love poem and the love song: the accusatory, needful *I* and the hateful, beloved *You*
COEUR DE LION seems like both an embodiment and deconstruction of the lov...more
Of course, that's the province of the love poem and the love song: the accusatory, needful *I* and the hateful, beloved *You*
COEUR DE LION seems like both an embodiment and deconstruction of the lov...more
The loving desperation, the voice of Ariana Reines is embodied in this book. I feel as if I’m in the room hanging on every interaction, like I am an unnoticed intruder frozen to the floor boards. This is a love poem that makes a connection & keeps your tied for eternity.
Beautiful, touching, personal, unpolished in the best way. I started reading this once and then stopped, almost a year ago. Today I read the whole thing and it was a great way to read it. It's like being deep in conversation with someone for hours on end.
Throbbing, simple, dense, banal, literary, lovelorn. Like a confessional, for which exact subjectivity I'm not sure. Like the best live-journal entries I've ever read. And who better to translate 'Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl'.
I loved this.
At times, I felt like some kind of a voyeur reading it--but not a voyeur of sleaze; more like a voyeur of open authenticity.
There are lots of parts I like. Here is one of them:
The words on a page
In an open book
Looked stupid to
Me when I was little
Unless I was right up close
To them. They looked
Weak; barely
There.
It made me nervous
That in order
For words on a page
To have power
I had to be close.
I had to be close.
This book puts me in mind of someone I know and semi-secretly love but canno...more
At times, I felt like some kind of a voyeur reading it--but not a voyeur of sleaze; more like a voyeur of open authenticity.
There are lots of parts I like. Here is one of them:
The words on a page
In an open book
Looked stupid to
Me when I was little
Unless I was right up close
To them. They looked
Weak; barely
There.
It made me nervous
That in order
For words on a page
To have power
I had to be close.
I had to be close.
This book puts me in mind of someone I know and semi-secretly love but canno...more
mixed emotions. loved some quotes, hated her sometimes (because of loving a jerk maybe) i kept thinking she had hairy armpits
This is a testament to that space between childhood and adulthood that we all waver between, no matter our age.
Richard Hell reviewed it! http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_...
[Read for Poetry Month, April 2013]
[Read for Poetry Month, April 2013]
Jan 26, 2013
Gene Tanta
added it
"Whether as a gadfly to the bigger kids in communist Romania or as a teenager in Chicago, part of me always wanted to be hip, but another part always knew that it was too much work.
What does it mean to be hip? It means to be urban, wired, social, to occupy the latest spaces, to perform the most contemporary habits according to a precise code. If being hip means being urban, multinational, vanguard, does being unhip end up meaning that one has to be rural, nationalistic, or even parochial?"
http:/...more
What does it mean to be hip? It means to be urban, wired, social, to occupy the latest spaces, to perform the most contemporary habits according to a precise code. If being hip means being urban, multinational, vanguard, does being unhip end up meaning that one has to be rural, nationalistic, or even parochial?"
http:/...more
I don't have to pay attention / To all the things that're destroying / My existence. The ultimate / Is gradually accomplished / Whether I watch or not. (P59)
HOW DARE THE INTERNET / REFUSE TO CONVULSE. (P61)
Wal-Mart has no weather / Either. (P62)
HOW DARE THE INTERNET / REFUSE TO CONVULSE. (P61)
Wal-Mart has no weather / Either. (P62)
I think this is the best book of poetry I've read in fifteen years.
I read this in one day - that's how gripping & essential it is. Written in a style that is compelling, addictive, direct; Reines is both clumsy and graceful, and the poem has a catalytic effect. How anyone can write such truthful lines despite the cynicism such knowledge should inculcate is beyond me. For anyone looking for proof that there is such a thing as a love poetry that replicates the experience of pangs of lost desire: that wounds & turns in the gut and doesn't lie despite the h...more
Gobbled it. Will be digesting ad infinitum.
I felt a kinship to the intimate relational destruction on many significant levels of my being. I have no more to say of that.
i moaned.
Coeur de Lion is an enchantment, a curse, a beautiful book by a writer with talent coming out of her the way regular people, us regular people, would sweat on a hot day: it's like she doesn't even have to try. Coeur de Lion is a wheel of ripe and smelly cheese, an epistolary enchantment from and to that jigsawed into my sub-sub life. "Not your enormous feelings, but their representation." What better representation than this.
i loved the meditation on love gone awry that shifts from "jake" to poetry/thinking itself as the object, and at times this book has beautifully sincere and honest depictions of the author's life.
but some of this seemed sort of pretentious, a lot of hipster references/name dropping, and an ironic detached undercurrent at times, or a particular breed of sarcasm that i think is a little too affected.
but some of this seemed sort of pretentious, a lot of hipster references/name dropping, and an ironic detached undercurrent at times, or a particular breed of sarcasm that i think is a little too affected.
An unexpectedly enjoyable book. Not in the style that I typically appreciate for poetry, but blunt and somehow commendable for it.
...I was sick of thinking
About you this morning but
I was listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard
Cohen in order to think about
You for literary purposes.
When I feel nothing for a person
I get scared I'm losing my humanity
And that turning cold means
My heart's been botoxed; we're
All fucked.
--p. 84
About you this morning but
I was listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard
Cohen in order to think about
You for literary purposes.
When I feel nothing for a person
I get scared I'm losing my humanity
And that turning cold means
My heart's been botoxed; we're
All fucked.
--p. 84
it's so important that there are women.
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Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007; Fence: 2011), and MERCURY (Fence: forthcoming fall 2011), plus the LP/audiobook SAVE THE WORLD starring Lili Taylor (Fence: forthcoming spring 2011).
Volumes of translation include My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, (Mal-O-Mar:2009), The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Ni...more
More about Ariana Reines...
Volumes of translation include My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, (Mal-O-Mar:2009), The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Ni...more
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“When I feel nothing for a person I get scared I'm losing my humanity and that turning cold means my heart's been botoxed; we're all fucked.”
—
3 people liked it
“Where are the messy women who love the fragile boys.
Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
Where are the bitches who know what they want, who love what they do, bosomy and declarative, happy to be artistic in this stupid night.”
—
2 people liked it
More quotes…
Where are the suicides who are my heroes.
Where are the bitches who know what they want, who love what they do, bosomy and declarative, happy to be artistic in this stupid night.”
Sep 28, 2009 09:06am