Two qualities of Ariana Reines’s poetry I admire in A Sand Book are color and movement. By color, I mean the vibrancy of the words, the way the subjects of each poem attract the reader’s attention, and how they exist in her poems as something more. By movement, I mean the way both the content and the words create motion, how the words hold a unique rhythm, and how the content seems to buzz so that the poem itself feels alive. A poem I felt had a lot of ‘color’ was “DOWNTOWN STANDARD” on page 23. The poem uses distinct imagery, vibrant–not specifically in color–but in the way it stands so starkly in the poetry. These two sections, regarding windows, really stuck out to me:  

“Buildings     hollow beards

With windows cut in them”

“...the glass-fronted 

Alleys deceiving sunlight into

Mirages of liquid”

One example of movement in her words is found in the poem “A PARTIAL HISTORY” on page 5. Besides the occasional punctuation, the poem reads a lot like a run-on sentence. Each line is relatively short and each feeds into the next. Personally, I felt a rhythm as I read, the words, like waves each line was a new wave forming. Another example of movement, this time, in content, is found in “GLASGOW” on page 24. The focus of the reader moves from the street and surrounding area to the “her”, the woman who is a subject in the poem. The poem ends with dialogue from the book she is reading, moving the reader’s focus to another level of the scene. It is all very fluid, but the spacing between some of the words makes the way I read it more fragmented, which I found to be an interesting contrast. 

Finally, I was intrigued by the ending section, “MOSIAC”, which visually stands apart from the rest of the book as it is printed on black paper with white text. The introduction was so compelling, how she contextualizes this moment with what she was working on at the time and her mental state. I was enthralled by how this presence struck her in such a way, how she described it as warmth washing over her accompanied by masculine energy but also emphasizing it as hard to describe. These lines, in particular, spoke to me: “It was like what some poets have written about. It was like nothing any poet has been able to put into words.”  Though I cannot relate to her specific experience, I understand the experience of feeling something that goes beyond words, something so hard to describe it feels like words may never be enough. I also was touched by her vulnerability, how she writes she was struggling with feelings of not having the right to language and life, and how much she was affected by stage fright, a lack of self-confidence, and overwhelming silence. I appreciated her honesty and related to it in some ways, and I felt that because she included these very transparent, human, emotions it was easier to imagine the effect this ‘presence’ had on her at that moment. The words that follow felt universal, almost biblical, in the way they are stated. I thought the connections made were very compelling.