A Sand Book

Longlist, National Book Awards 2019 for Poetry

ISBN 9781947793323
Tin House Books
Ariana Reines

Named one of Flavorwire’s 100 Most Important Living Writers and “a crucial voice of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt, Ariana Reines is a poet, Obie-winning playwright, & performing artist. Her books include A Sand Book, the play Telephone, The Origin Of The World, Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow. More about this author >

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From the publisher:

A Sand Book is a poetry collection in nine parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland to the massacre at Sandy Hook, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, from Attar’s “Conference of the Birds” to Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” to Twitter, A Sand Book is about change and quantification, the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. It moves among houses of worship and grocery stores, flitters between geological upheaval and the weird weather of the Internet. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury, Reines has written her most ambitious work to date, but also her most visceral and satisfying.

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