Ariana Rienes Is A Giant

Mercury is a ball of liquid metal.  It looks as if you should not touch it, but should just look at it.  Look at yourself looking at it.  Look at yourself in it.  Ariana suggests shaving in its glow.  There are a lot of reviews of it already, so I shouldn’t review it.  I won’t.  I won’t tell you to buy it.  I won’t tell you to steal it.  Where would you steal it from anyway?  Powell’s doesn’t even carry fence books.  Why would your local book store carry it if mine doesn’t?  Would I steal it if it were here?  Maybe.  Maybe if I went to a bookstore that had Mercury and I stole it, the event of my thievery would lead the bookstore to believe Mercury was worth stealing, therefore worth selling, therefore would order another, or two others to make up for the money lost on the first one which I might have stolen. Why won’t I tell you to buy it?  I don’t know, because supporting poetry is about entering contests and reading periods right?  I do think people would like this.  Not just people who like Ariana’s work, but people who like big books and people who like weird books.  This book is full of the things people like about Ariana’s work.  Her work is honest.  It’s honest in the way writing can be honest because you can tell it’s lying sometimes.  It’s honest in the way it has flaws.  It’s honest in the way it has adornments and those adornments draw attention to their own adornmenthood amongst all the flaws like a chandelier in a shitty apartment.  Or spinning rims on a late model Cavalier.

When Ariana read she reminded me of when Ariana talked to people before the reading.  She was quiet and intimidated everyone by sheer fact of existence.  When she read the church gave out books.  They gave out books with words such as:  “What is art? Prostitution.” “A Dandy does nothing.” and “Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.”  All of this is from Charles Baudelaires Intimate Journals and it’s a lovely book for a church to be handing out.  The church played music and Ariana read and it was too loud to make out anything that was real.  Maybe it was all that was real.