Heroines of Nothing at All

What’s in a rose?

Though it may smell as sweet when given any other name, its myriad evocations in Ariana Reines’s new eponymous collection wouldn’t be the same under any other flower. The iris belongs to Louise Glück, poppies to Sylvia Plath. Peonies and daisies don’t buckle under the canonical weight the rose conjures across texts and time. To wit, in The Odyssey, “the rosy-fingered dawn” personifies the breaking of day. Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses states, “I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put a rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used.” In these sources, the rose is an emblem of traditional sexuality and femininity, fresh-faced and spry. More than a century later, Reines concretizes the rose when she “visualize[s] a pussy / Closing in on itself.” Here, I can’t help but recall Eileen Myles’s poem “I always put my pussy,” in which they write: “my lover’s pussy ... is a deer’s face / is a handful / of flowers.” The rose pulses with possibility: both a bud (“closing in”) as well as a flowering animal: animate and ardent.

The Rose, Reines’s fifth and most captivating full-length collection, is all about bodies (historical, mythical, or contemporary). She is interested in corporeality, fleshy folds “bunched with grief”; the rose as a rose is not figurative, but corpulent and real. “The fragrance / Disgust[s] me”, she writes. “Petals / Like grandmother / Arms folded & / The terribly soft / Smell of a living / Body giving / Itself over / To nature.” Evoking petrichor odors and decay, Reines undercuts the rose as a symbol of romance or girlish femininity, refuting preconceived notions of gender.

The book also serves as a companion to Reines’s recent hybrid-essay collection Wave of Blood (Divided Publishing, 2025), wherein she grapples with the power (or failure) of language in the face of acute grief: her mother’s suicide, the Israeli State’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and the familial, historical inheritance of trauma from the Holocaust. Part diary, part essay, part autotheory, Wave of Blood ultimately contends with what poetry can and cannot do for us psychically, spiritually, and materially.

One central throughline of tension in Reines’s work is more evident in Wave of Blood than in The Rose: What is the role of language, especially in the midst of unspeakable tragedy? To draw our attention to the carnage? Or to offer a reprieve from suffering through abstraction and figuration? Searching for answers, Reines harnesses language to illuminate and underscore war, desire, and grief. While in Waves of Blood she admits “you can’t fit all of life into words,” she also acknowledges, “If you refuse to feel, your writing will die.” Life and art are about both the ineffable and the impulse to transmute that feeling into language.

Toward the end of Wave of Blood, Reines reflects on the process of writing The Rose: “Femininity ... has become for me the dynamic through which I wrestle with my own violence and consciously decide to do something different with it than attack outwardly.” In the collection, her gender is an instrument through which she can understand the brutality of the world, as well as her place in it. But this process is more rhizomatic than linear. “It took me hours & days to foment those desires,” she writes, “but once they had / ripened, I found I couldn’t use them // I want to vomit, die, & change my life in that exact order ... I am the idiot of the ages & their scion, their son.” Though Reines describes her “I” as a “son,” the “I” never loses its association with femininity and female archetypes. Various other female figures from antiquity appear in The Rose—Sappho, Persephone—creating a composite understanding of femininity as multivalent and polyvocal. But if we return to the rose as pussy, pussy as rose, what also links Reine’s two recent books is the embodiment, and endurance, of time. “Menstruation is not an idea,” Reines writes in Wave of Blood. “It is not a concept ... it is an experience of time.”

Though the first poem in The Rose opens in “Garden / God / Eden / Prison // Prison / Eden / Garden / God,” there is no beginning or endpoint in Reines’s evocation of origin stories. Time involutes in a bloom-space of possibility. Like a trickster, Reines’s “I” slips from the present day to ancient Greece with impunity. The second poem starts: “Being of the future ... I want you to know I too sometimes feel / An unnatural feeling / Electric.” This image (and line break) recurs in the final “Medea”:

... I closed 
The door in his face 
Sent him away 
Then went out to find him 
Idling on the curb 
Screamed at him & he screamed right back 
Went back inside 
Shaking 
Electric

We jolt across time on the pressurized waves of Reines’s truncated lines. Her “I” is an agent of action who does not wilt at the prospect of conflict. Instead, she courts it. She precipitates rejection—and the chase—with an autonomy reconfiguring heterosexual relationships anew. Though “shaking” might suggest fear, her next line undercuts such a reading. Reines’s protagonist is chuffed, flush on her rebuke and, above all, charged:

Texted that he should stay 
Away using two separate 
Messaging 
Applications 
Double over 
Upon myself 
& wept 
Yearned for his return 
& he did come back 
Fucked my brains out 
Exactly 
The way I wanted

By enjambing “stay / Away,” Reines foregrounds her narrator’s competing emotions without judgment. Yet internal conflict doesn’t indicate a woman confused about her desires. She gets “Exactly / [what she] wanted.” And though “he” does the fucking, this moment seems to exemplify Maggie Nelson’s “active bottom” in Bluets (2009), wherein submission and domination promiscuously intertwine. Rather than succumb to fourth-wave feminism’s well-worn obsession with women’s empowerment, Reines offers an alternative:

I want to be hurt & I organize this feeling 
Because the age in which I live 
Compels me to respect myself 
It is my duty to do so 
& even though our contemporary idea 
Of liberation would allow me to display 
My own abasement in “empowering” terms 
Should I ever seek to display it 
I am talking about something deep inside me 
Not about the theory of how to show it ... 
By my refusal, almost identical 
To devotion, to violate, with any approximation 
My hunger

“I want,” along with Reines’s use of the present tense, conveys a complete clarity of consciousness. Even as Reines’s “I” unequivocally understands her sexual proclivities, she also understands contemporary society demands such female desires be trotted out in public for sport. Ergo, in Halina Reijn’s buzzy erotic thriller Babygirl (2024), Nicole Kidman’s character cannot simply get off on S&M-lite. She must admit to a “darkness” within her, literally pathologizing that which makes her hot and horny. Yawn. Reines has no interest in such performativity. For her, the primordial “deep” does not need to be “displayed.” Desire fomenting for desire’s sake is enough.

Like sex, anger and violence in The Rose are not distinguished by gender, nor particular to a certain place or time. In “The Hanged Man,” the “I” and “he” “passed / Out with our pants around our legs like closeted men / In another era.” Sex and gender become costumes our narrator can don or shed. One such costume is Medea, a recurring, mythic figure who killed the two children she had with Jason, and his new bride. Medea would rather destroy everything she loves than bear witness to Jason’s betrayal. When he keels at the news, she reassures him, “Not yet do you feel it. Wait for the future.” As Medea does, Reines can simultaneously exist within two different temporalities. The Rose posits Reines’s narrator as “Being of the future”; later she observes, “I live in Time.”

As with other archetypal women throughout the collection, Reines transmutes Medea’s suffering into her own—embodying her interiority and rewriting our understanding of this classical narrative. Here, the woman is a contriver, but Jason is (blessedly) absent. “The girl in the story often / Doesn’t even want a man,” Reines reflects. “But they don’t teach you that do they.” No, “they” certainly don’t. And yet. The Rose offers an alternative narrative wherein femmes of all stripes can find shards of their own reflection: furious, fearful, filthy. Which is to say, just “another woman” who “wants a devil / An animal. To escape / The raping god—to be a tree.” In other words, a woman who wants to be “The heroine of nothing at all.”

“Words are crude,” as Susan Sontag opines in her 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence.” Whether crude or refined, they are still the mortar with which our societies are built. Reines wades in that linguistic muck, willing, word by word, something sacred (or profane) into being. What she arouses in her final poem, “Theory of the Flower,” is a heaving, breathing body, telluric and floral. “A flower,” she writes, “is not an idea... / my body... // not a place... / she wraps the earth... // she sings to me... / Mother // no such thing / no theory of the flower // exists // YOU FALL // INTO EARTH // YOU OPEN.” In The Rose, this flower will not code switch (as women have historically) between a signifier of beauty and a subject. “I don’t ‘have ideas about’ catastrophe,” Reines notes in the same poem, “it’s just my body. theory of the flower / we only care about what we can see....” Why pontificate about catastrophe, when so many people materially feel—and live—it? The book ends with a directive in all caps, proffering the potential for hope, survival, and, above all, bloom.

As Reines observes in Wave of Blood, in a world rent by genocide or filicide, it can often feel like there’s no room for theory or abstraction. The children dying in Palestine at the hands of Israel’s government are not just a statistic, but fully human: “no two faces no two wounds the same.” What matters is the matter: the flowering body, the breath beating through us, the bleeding edges that constitute a singular life.

Is solidarity only ever thus a moral abstraction when placed into language? Reines knows the answer (of course not). But her own identity as a Jew (specifically the descendent of Holocaust survivors) living in the US constantly begs the question, while continuing to bear witness to atrocities overseas. (She asks: “If our fathers / & mothers loved us right / Would we need to write”?) Because of this military industrial complex, and in spite of it, we do need language—especially from poets. Language does matter both politically and personally. It is not a magical elixir, but it can define policy or produce a particular effect in its recipient: a reader, or a lover—sometimes one and the same.

In an early, untitled poem from The Rose, a man fumbles to compliment Reines’s narrator after fucking. She responds, “I want to receive in / words, an energy I want to force him to force thru language.” She continues, “You are going to give me this compliment directly, I say. & I steady / myself to receive his words distinguishing me from every other woman / he has ever known. It’s silly, I know. But. // I look in his face & he obeys.” Words allow for both recognition and alterity, the ability to refuse or consent. In interpersonal relationships, words also welcome a kind of communion between the giver and the receiver, an ever-oscillating exchange of power and control. What makes The Rose so pleasurable is that femininity—and gender at large—is not fixed, nor starved, of its personal needs. In a world overflowing with suffering, there is no want too great, too “silly” (or maybe it is, but who cares?) for Reines’s narrator. It feels like a radical act of pleasure. To paraphrase Roland Barthes, we know a lot about desire, but little of pleasure. Pleasure, however thorny, abounds in Reines’s language, and in the bodies of characters perpetually gasping at “The secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love.”