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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, more you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From the KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Ariana Rines, who's the author of two books of poetry.

One won the Alberta Prize.

It was her first book, The Cow, published

by Fence Press, and her new book, Curde Leon, has been published by a press that she's

started herself called Malamar. I first heard Ariana reading at a celebration for the second issue of a new

literary magazine called Soft Targets. I was very excited by the work. She gave me a gift of her book.

I read it, was thrilled by it, one of the most extreme and intense, and at the same time, funny in a

mad and grotesque metaphor-breaking way. Then Cour de Leon has come recently. It is a very different kind of book, as you will see as we talk in this episode.

Both of these books are interesting in the line of contemporary poetry because both have been imagined as books.

The first, the cow, takes on, well, it said on its book flap, its subject is industrial

slaughter, but one would say industrial slaughter on every level of animals, but also of the culture and of language and of poetry.

So that it involves a good deal of overarching and rivaling systems of metaphor that are constantly interrupting and violating one another.

Curde Leon is a book-length narrative poem, and as its title might suggest, it's a sort of

de generation of medieval courtly poetry.

Tell me why it's important to you to imagine your work as a complete book, as opposed to a collection of individual poems.

Well, I suppose because objects arrive technologically produced and perfect as declaring themselves

as themselves all the time.

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