The Cow - Softcover

Reines, Ariana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0977106470 ISBN 13: 9780977106479

Publisher: Fence Books, 2006

Synopsis

This text is filthy and fertilized, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, atrocious and politic with meaning. The Cow is a mother, a lover, and a murdered lump of meat, rendered in the strongest of languages. "I cannot count the altering that happens in the very large rooms that are the guts of her."

About this title

About the Author

Named one of Flavorwire's 100 best living writers and "a crucial voice of her generation" by KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt, Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator. Her books include A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize & longlisted for the National Book Award, The Cow (Alberta Prize, 2006), Coeur De Lion (2007), and Mercury (2011), all from Fence Books, and The Origin of the World (2014) from Semiotext(e). Her Obie-winning play Telephone (2009) was commissioned by The Foundry Theatre and has been performed and published in Norwegian translation at the Mollebyen Literary Festival (2017) and at KW Berlin (2018) among others. Recent commissions include Possession (2023), a major sculpture & performance collaboration with Liz Magic Laser, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, and Divine Justice (2022), a 24-hour theatrical environment at Performance Space New York. Reines’ performances & theatrical works include: Mortal Kombat (2015), commissioned by Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne & performed at The Whitney Museum, New York, NY, USA, and Gallery TPW, Toronto, CA, and Lorna (2013) at Martin E. Segal Theatre, New York, USA, both in collaboration with Jim Fletcher, The Origin of the World (2013) at Modern Art, London UK, and many others. Art exhibitions include Pubic Space (2016), a collaboration with Oscar Tuazon at Modern Art in London, UK, Exhaust (2016) at Contemporary Art Tasmania, AU, and Jane Dark (2014) at Western Front, Vancouver, Canada. Reines is the translator of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (Mal-O-Mar, 2009); Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (Semiotext(e) 2009); and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young Girl (Semiotext(e) 2012).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

AFTER I DIED I TRIED TO BECOME THE NIGHT

So many ways of being illuminated gas.

A gelid streak of apple goo a purl of it I peel away from me and eat.

I know that really beautiful women are never alone.

Their intelligence curls up like a fist in them and sweetens the shutter on

their clits.

Even bodies have to exist in an environment.

Fleshy pink hood over those long lips.

Surviving. Aspics inside of which a day is held ajar.

KNOCKER

Acres of wishes inside her. Any liver. To harden the gut. Boys rinse their

arms in what falls from my carotid. My body is the opposite of my body

when they hang me up by my hind legs. I mean the opposite thing. Not

a wall with windows in it and flaglets of laundry waving or being so easy

to mouth his so-thick. Sloes and divorcing her miserable eyes from the

rumor they stir up in me. Everything on the planet is diverted.

Worse is less bloody pussies to lick. Everything good’s an animal.

Asymptomatic. Causing one thing to fuck another. Introducing between

one thing and another one of those copula which is an and. Genitals are

for togetherness. Put her two feet in the stirrups.

I wish I could remember when it was her mouth fastened itself in the

rictus of pure hunger she still wears. Her teeth the color of some kind of

caviar or dirty marble, shining behind the waxen smear of mouth. I don’t

care what happens next except to see her. I don’t want to know the end

of the story.

So skyey guilty for existing. Light’s a kind of bane. Fish fat. Factota. I

need that man in my life.

In heat a lady could be other than what she had assimilated. Two breasts

of almond paste. She smiled against the cracked varnish on her mouth.

Pates basted in sunshine. Or whole instances of consciousness corralled

inside themselves. What’s the outermost border of a thought, what’s the

ordure of an event. In heat a lady. Tits swinging, White udders. Apertures.

Woman make me. Want to be a jockstrap, shit-stained. Walled-in by 

her own substance. A car encased her or an agate. Steamships and

pissoirs, the resinous accretion of pharmaceuticals in her. Antimacassars

embroidered with zodiacs, gold threads, incisors, or womb. A little

everyday renovation.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fence Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0977106470
• ISBN 13: 9780977106479
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 109