Wednesday 22nd of April
6.30pm to 9pm
Please join us for the UK launch of The Rose (Penguin) by Ariana Reines. Ariana will be joined by Sophie Robinson author of Prairie Oyster (Little, Brown, 2026).
The Rose navigates the intersection of power and surrender. Drawing on the history of ‘romance’ as the troubadours knew it, and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, award-winning poet Ariana Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: ‘I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.’ In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humour. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the ‘secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,’ and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.
Praise for The Rose:
'Ariana Reines's poetry is what happens when the goddess comes to earth' Jenny Zhang
'Thrilling and harrowing... offers a trail that leads, if not to madness, to something that goes beyond rational sense' Chris Kraus
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and performing artist from Salem, Massachusetts. Her books include 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner, A Sand Book, and Alberta Prizewinning; The Cow. Her play, Telephone, won two Obies and has been performed internationally. In 2020, she founded Invisible College, a study hall for poetry, ancient texts, and the arts. She lives in New York City.
Sophie Robinson's debut poetry collection Rabbit (Boiler House Press, 2018) was the Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice, and poems from it were highly commended by the Forward Prize. Her work has been published in Granta, the Guardian, BOMB Magazine, The Believer, N+1, The Poetry Review and The White Review. Prairie Oyster is her first novel.