This text is filthy and fertilized, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, atrocious and politic with meaning. The Cow is a mother, a lover, and a murdered lump of meat, rendered in the strongest of languages. "I cannot count the altering that happens in the very large rooms that are the guts of her."
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Review
"The Cow, Reines's first book, opens lyrically: 'The day is a fume. At starboard, a white kirtle which is the moon. The day has a hallmark, the night also.' This lyricism is sustained for a few poems, but soon thereafter the sensual grit of Reines's project rears its head and dominates the book: 'I held his cock while he peed with it.' The Cow draws its imagery extensively, and explicitly, from the cow, its body, and the human and its body; it flirts with certain grrrl fierceness, but the work ultimately feels less invested in gender per se than in humanness. The book as a whole is concerned with processing, production, and rendering, and while a poem might focus on the processing of an animal into various products for human consumption, Reines is also concerned with how we humans are 'processed' through our relationships with others and through the approximations of language. Both identity and meaning are multifarious, interconnected: 'Everything is part of something.' In this way the cow is animal, product, woman, and action: 'I am not the nice man in the mart I am the mart itself, which is inside of a dog . . . I am inside of him and a mart isn't an I.' The body is not only image or occasion to write, but integral to the act of creation: 'My whole body writes.' And just as the various parts of the cow as product are graphically detailed, language itself can be broken apart ('an umlaut could be a cousin's bone') or condensed or ground up ('glv ovr me. Brns; ozne'). As interested as Reines is in communication and representation, she seems to retain a healthy dose of suspicion in her project, beginning her final poem with the line 'Does a resemblance really mean anything.' There is a desire in this narrator to 'empty language out of me,' but after such a visceral defecation, what is left? 'What. Now What,' she writes, and like Beckett, she embraces her paradox, finishing The Cow on "Go on. Go on."--Emily Wolahan, The Boston Review
Review
"No doubt about it, this is strong and original work. Scary in the best possible way." (Richard Foreman )
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"My whole body writes" ... and it makes sense.,
This review is from: The Cow (Paperback)
This book is a seamless collage of patches of flesh and pages of
industrial literature, pushing us without a gasmask or sunglasses into a multi-sensory experience: a new awareness of modern life, a projection of an animal "I" trapped in a hygienic death machine, "a non-burn technology that repeatedly achieves guaranteed sterilization of tissue." The messenger is an angel playing with its guts, haunted by the Holocaust of meat's sensitivity. "A kink in the air because something is in it I am." A self-conscious fat gooze that by wonder flies and sings with natural grace over natural filth, knowing that the end is near, because "every line keens toward the same trough, every line leans over like heavy lilies, [...] wanting to get dirty and die." Reines delivers her sincere and complete perception of reality to whomever reads her words. With bright wit, she puts together the pieces of the Puzzle in a scheme that we are afraid to recognize.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
your life is not worth much if you haven't read it,
By cerark "cerark" (israel) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Cow (Paperback)
there are very few books i carry with me everywhere i go; this is one of them. you know what i mean. the words haunt me at the most unexpected moments. you'll be completely and utterly obsessed.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a renewal,
By
This review is from: The Cow (Paperback)
THE COW raises the bar. Razes the pastures it grazes. Can poetry have guts? Here, Ariana Reines proves it so. This text is sure to be an avant-garde classic. The amplification poetry needed so badly.
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