"Even the sun, formerly a conduit of mystical knowledge in Reines’s A Sand Book, does not offer deliverance: “The sun falls on my head like a priestly hand—the gentleness of its blessing is almost enraging—why won’t it slap me, why won’t it push me, why won’t it force me to become better than I am.” In another poem titled “New York,” she writes, searchingly, “Why doesn’t this kind of killing afflict the weather here? / Why doesn’t the Earth say something? / But it does. In your body.” Reines frequently insists on the somatic as a method of accessing a more cosmic discernment, which I fear turns inquiry further and further inward, into the winding gut and arcane bone, rather than outward, toward the articulations and solidities of other people. But her questions read, movingly, like the ragged half of an incomplete catechism. I am touched by the sun’s failure to provide longed-for punishment and rehabilitation. The existence of a bright, warm day, and the whirring of the colonial death machine: our reality holds both. There are times when that can only seem like a terrible affront. Reines quotes Milton, where he describes Satan “shit-talking the sun”: “O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams / That bring to my remembrance from what state / I fell. . . .” She explicates, “Milton’s Satan hates nature, and he hates what is, he’s against what is, he’s against what is real.” It’s hard not to relate."
