A Sand Book

Ariana Reines' insurrectionary invocations break my heart and uplift me at the same time. Is that possible? Her feral kindness is excruciating in its dangerously playful healing power. Her primal compassion is stripped of sentimentality: generously weaponized so as to supercharge my ability to FEEL EVERYTHING I NEED TO FEEL BUT HAVEN'T FELT YET.I thought I had already developed a robust capacity to empathize with the world's pain and joy and confusion and glory. It's a centerpiece of my Hermetic Qabalistic aspirations to do so. But Reines' tender howling balm of future intelligence pushes me further—into the frontier of Rimabud's "Je est un autre"—with access to the visceral absolute of I am you and you are me and they are we and we are all together.The spiritual philosophy called "nondualism" has always perplexed me, because its teachers talk about it in such dry, dead language that's rife with dualistic concepts. I'm thankful for Reines' magick spells, which are the antidote—which outflank the hyper-rational version of nondualism as they animate and nurture the Real Mysterium. Her dionysian perceptions, her blasts of lovingly convulsive paradox, dare us to be reverently awake inside the ecstatic life-and-death crisis of each moment.Also: She is luminously numinous and numinously luminous; she's holy eerie and eerie holy. Her scary trials unfailingly mutate into sacred trails.

A Sand Book is a pleasure for your right-brain. let the words wash over you, and see what happens! The title is a poem as well: Sand (Book) is of a substance that is at once ancient and present, solid but shifting and not meant to be held onto, the stuff of solid sand castles and the inevitable transmutation back to source.Reading Sand was like making my own sandcastles because her warrior words inspired my unconscious- she gave me wild dreams . I am not a student of poetry, and poetry of this caliber can feel inaccessible without a literary background to recognize the subtle references to other literary works, however, like the sand castles, she lets us know that it doesn’t really matter - what matters is that when you can see the world through Reines irreverent, and therefore, deeply reverent eyes, you too will see the shimmer in the grit of sand.

If you're looking to read a poetry collection that talks directly about the strangeness of being alive right now, this is it. But also: if you're looking to read a poetry collection that feels ancient and connected to mysterious and sacred stuff, to all those places and words and ideas that resist being modernized and killed, this is it.

The poems in this book are incredible. They're fluid and energetic, spontaneous and exacting. A 300 page book of poetry where every word sings.

her work is always wonderful! this one is too.

She's the real deal

I purchased this as a Christmas gift for a twenty something female relative. She loves it

Beautiful and fun

a book of lists of words. no discernible poetic value. beyond possibly artifice. returned it.