We are ecstatic to welcome poet Ariana Reines to The Second Shelf to celebrate the publication of The Sand Book, as well as the publication of The Second Shelf's first poetry broadside, "How to Wear It" printed by Hurst Street Press.

The poem was first commissioned and published in our first magazine and was inspired by Sylvia Plath's tartan skirt, which is for sale and will be on display.

We then had it printed as a broadside by Hurst Street Press and it will be signed by Reines for the first time, shipped to customers who have pre-ordered (or who would like to pick up in the shop.) It is considered a fundraiser for our business and some are still available, if you would like to reserve one, you can do so here, or you can purchase it as an add-on through Eventbrite.

Reines will be in conversation with writer and The Second Shelf proprietor A. N. Devers. We are wildly excited and consider this a wrap party for the first magazine, a celebration of our bookshop, of one of our favourite poets and her new book A Sand Book (released in the US by Tin House 18/06/19, forthcoming in the UK).

We will also have a number of first editions of Reines's work for sale.

Ariana Reines is the author of Mercury (2011), The Cow (2006), and Coeur de Lion (2007). Her play Telephone was produced at the Cherry Lane Theater and won several Obie awards. Reines was the 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California Berkeley; she has taught master classes at Pomona College, the University of California Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in New York, NY.

A Sand Book is a poetry collection in nine parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity, desertification to prophecy, and mother to daughter. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange and desperate times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland to the massacre at Sandy Hook, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, from Attar’s “Conference of the Birds” to Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” to Twitter, A Sand Book is about change and quantification, the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. It moves among houses of worship and grocery stores, flitters between geological upheaval and the weird weather of the Internet. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury, Reines has written her most ambitious work to date, but also her most visceral and satisfying.