Ariana Reines is a poet and playwright. Her newest books are The Rose (Graywolf: 2025) and Wave of Blood (Divided: 2024). A Sand Book (Tin House: 2019) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She has created performances for The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Stuart Shave Modern Art, Swiss Institute, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Performance Space New York, and many others, and she wrote the Obie-winning play TELEPHONE. In 2020, as a Divinity student at Harvard, she founded Invisible College, where people gather to study poetry, sacred texts, and the arts.
Ever since I started this project, I knew I needed to have Ariana on and I was so glad when the scheduling finally aligned to make it work. We talk a great deal about the ‘fraternal twin’ nature of her two most recent books and how they hold the balance of processing her own emotional life with the collective grief and anguish of global events, most specific to the aftermath of Oct 7.
I didn’t specifically name this in the conversation but as we talked about this balancing act, I kept thinking about the practice Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi), which is a Japanese art form where broken ceramics are mended with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, highlighting the cracks as beautiful, unique features rather than disguising them as a way to embrace imperfection, symbolizing resilience, history, and beauty in brokenness. This practice has been on my mind as I have gotten deeper into my art therapy studies this fall and have really been falling in love with the idea that the gold adhesive paint is the metaphor for what art making can do for the soul.
Anyway, all this to say, Ariana’s poems are the gold and hearing her talk about the practice of embodied living to write them is the balm.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did having it.
playlist
I broke the form of the show by having Ariana read from Wave of Blood at the top of the show but this live Jeff Buckley performance of his cover of “Satisfied Mind” was Ariana’s musical select for the show.
It’s a beautiful song so I thought I would share here.
At the end, I played ANONHI’s “Marrow” from their incredible record Hopelessness. We got to hear the beginning but due to Apple Music needing to be restarted, we didn't get to play the full song so I thought I would just add here as well.
