Love and Rejection In An Era of Cocksucking and Gmail: Ariana Reines's Coeur de Lion

There is a fine line drawn between the intimate thoughts shared by a writer in their poetry and what the civil courts could determine to be “libel.” The balance between the type of raw, personal language that emotions like love and heartbreak demand and one that may effectuate a universal experience with which the reader can and will identify is intricate. If ever there were a book that teetered precariously (and perfectly) on that line, it would be Ariana Reines’ Coeur de Lion.

Coeur de Lion is a detailed account of the range of feelings involved in falling out of love. Composed of a series of segmented reflections written almost entirely in second person – addressed directly to Jake, the narrator’s former object of affection – Coeur de Lionweaves seamlessly between an utterly personal narration of this love and a more objective examination of the writing process itself.

At its most seemingly candid, it is the ramblings of a madwoman hacking into Gmail accounts, describing various sexual encounters with blunt force, recounting run-ins with mutual friends and whining about old habits that annoyed her; countering this are meditations on what the narrator desires, the nature of being a woman, the schism between “you” (her former lover) and “you” (the reader of the text – quite certainly a different person than the first “you”) and running allusions to famous works of literature and art, the motifs that grant Ariana an understanding of her own relationship.

Early in the book this delicate balance begins to display itself quite clearly. At one moment the narrator actively questions who the “you” she is addressing in her poems truly is:

I thought about you and how scary it is

The way you keep your distance

And I thought about the cherishing feeling

I sometimes have for you.

Thinking about a person.  Surely

That act releases something

Into the atmosphere.  A toxin?

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.

In simple discourse like this, what was between Ariana and Jake instantly becomes a deeper reflection on the nature of the love poem and the disparity between the poetic “I” or “you” and the referents that these pronouns are supposed to be signifying. Moments later the text returns to a sexual encounter in Venice.  Here the narration turns back to the intimate experiences unique to Ariana and Jake:

You fucked me

You came somewhere on me

I had a painful zit on my upper lip

And we were covered in dust

Constantly, Ariana speaks so bluntly about her relationship that she seems to trivialize it. The effect is that, at times, she is trivializing Jake as well. That is why, at its most malicious, people could interpret the collection as libelous, an ill-willed revelation of just how awful Jake is, or at the very least an attempt to perturb him over his shortcomings and warn other women. But I think the intellectuality and those moments of uncertain introspection lend themselves to a better understanding of Coeur de Lion as a poet’s catharsis, wherein the narrator was able to exorcise her feelings for this boy through writing about them. Furthermore, Ariana’s concern is not centered on destroying Jake, but lending a voice to those who cannot express so poignantly the wrongs they have suffered.  That is, after all, the poet’s job.

This is why that poetic “I” could inflict much more pain and damage than the real “I,” for the narrator speaks not just for Ariana, but also for every wronged woman, mistreated and marginalized for love.

Any review of Coeur de Lion would not be complete without further mention of its unabashed contemporariness. The theme of love in modern society runs prevalent, as Gmail espionage plays a central role and we barely reach page three before we hear about jpeg’s of other women. Reines uses this unambiguously modern setting to examine the role of women in an era where they are supposedly equal to men. Early on Reines speaks of being the “Gallery Girl” and what that entails: being interested in proximity to rich artists and buyers, or “acting pretty and disdainful,” despite being neither of those things.

In another poem, she compares her own writing to that of the medieval chivalric genre:

All that medieval love poetry

With its military metaphors

The woman as the fortress

The errancies of gallant knights.

Maybe long ago things were too

Too solid, and now we live in an ether

Of ex-sentiments, impossible

To make sense of. . .

This scrutiny of what it means to be a woman today and how a woman may be strong without coming of as “petty” or a “bitch” is essential to legitimizing Ariana’s right to defiantly publicize her and Jake’s intimacies in the first place. After all, some readers might see her as a madwoman for hacking Gmail, or a slut for fucking on a sidewalk in Venice, but this realness makes the text unquestionably relatable to the contemporary reader. Poems about love and failed relationships are not a new thing, but there is something about Ariana’s syntax and word choice, her blend of metaphysical reflection and sex without condoms, of words that are Greek to the contemporary reader and everyday swear words (“perfidy” and “cocksucking” need no distance between them in this epic), that makes Coeur de Lion impossible to shake off.

Its unique exploration of writing, romance and gender roles make Coeur de Lion an essential read. While the original Mal-O-Mar edition was out of print for a while, Fence Book’s newly edited version is out now, so there is no excuse to not have this in your library.

There Is A Certain Kind Of Light that You Can See Too Much Of

When I was a child my dad worked on machines that measured the flow of natural gas through pipelines. Similar to how mercury was once used in thermometers, the machines used mercury to measure the pressure in the pipelines. When the pressure changed, the mercury would move and the machine would move and a little pen would mark the movement on a piece of paper. Sometimes the machines would leak tiny amounts of mercury causing the machine to become inaccurate. My dad would fix the leak and replace the lost mercury and re-calibrate the machine. The field office where my dad worked had a special drain in the floor that was designed to collect mercury that fell out of the machines when they were brought in for repair. One time my father brought some mercury home, and my brother and I were allowed to play with the tiny balls of liquid metal. We pushed the beads around on our kitchen table. We could see our faces stretched out over the surface of the poisonous metal as our fingers prodded these little round mirrors.

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From the silver, mirror-like cover, to the use of symbols and glyphs, Mercury, by Ariana Reines, is a work of great design. It is divided into five sections:

LEAVES
SAVE THE WORLD
WHEN I LOOKED AT YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED
MERCURY
0

Each section possesses a unique form and content, but they are made of the same reflective material (like a liquid taking the shape of its container). A large part of the pleasure of Mercury comes from its slipperiness of form, style, and content all enacting its namesake.

Mercury’s poems show, on their surface, the face of the reader and the writer, but intrinsically they have properties that tell much more about our world and the pressures of its people. I know this sounds like a grand, ambitious, and reaching statement, but Mercury is a grand, ambitious, and reaching book of poems. Every edge of Mercury oozes our desires and flashes our excesses back at ourselves while emitting ancient logic and radiating some secret religion from inside its amorphous substance. This quality is best exemplified in the poem, “Baraka”:

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MEXICO TO CONQUER AMERICAN

…

I CAN’T WAIT TO GROW THE DECAPITATED FLOWER

I CAN’T WAIT FOR UPENDED PIGEONS

REVERSED RAINBOWS AND SNAKE-EATING LIQUID GOLD

I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE DEW TO FALL, TOMORROW, TODAY

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY TITS AND ABS

I CAN’T FOR THEY WON’T GO WHEN I GO

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY HIGH ASS AND MAC MOUTH

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A THICKER COCK

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A MODEST APARTMENT UNDER THE HOLE IN THE ROOF OF THE PANTHEON

“Baraka,” like the rest of Mercury, is equal parts shamanistic chant and confessional purge. Reines’s confessional lyrics are a spectacle created for the reader. The spectacle of Mercury ranges from internet porn and contemporary film, to discussions of the apocalypse with the sun (referred to as ‘lord’ in the poem “Truth or Consequences”) brought about by the lack of cattle roaming the surface of the earth. All of it through a fairly consistent first-person speaker who compulsively divulges everything. Reines’s speaker is also very aware of this spectacle being performed for the reader. She often points out the reader’s voyeurism at the peak of the spectacle:

You just texted me two cock pics

It used to be more artful

The way you did it, the composition.

Like last week, it just stopped raining.

I have a cold quicksilver feeling.

I could put this in a place where you could find it

But I’m hiding it here.

In moments like these, you realize that you are not just watching the poet watch someone else, but you’re watching the poet watch you watching her watch someone else, like an elaborate set-up of two-way mirrors and video cameras. The voyeuristic element of Mercury pushes the lyric beyond confession to exhibition: this isn’t the real, this is a performance. Even if the sex in “WHEN I SAW YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED,” the most graphic section of Mercury, is “real” or “true” it was still performed as if it was pornographic film:

“when i get your cock like a bag my face is scarred i make my nails long around your cock that goes in and your balls jump fast like a dirt sack hop hop to her pussy like a pink gum crusted with durt”

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“It is more important to affirm the least sincere,” Frank O’Hara writes in Meditations in an Emergency. Ariana Reines must have been taking this to heart as she was composing Mercury, because like O’Hara does in Meditations, Reines endears us to the least sincere. Like the little pools of metal across my table as a child, the lyrics of Mercury roll around inside my head, and over my tongue, knowing its ability to get through my pores.