by Lena Rubin

“Someone should write a history of menstruation,” writes Ariana Reines in her recent Wave of Blood. Throughout the poetry and prose fragments that make up this astounding book, the experience of menstruation is invoked several times. Arguably, menstruation is not the forefront of the text, which perhaps more urgently deals with Israel’s war on Gaza and the endless war(s) that have preceded and continue to accompany it; the weight of the Holocaust and questions of Jewish complicity; and the death and life of Reines’ mother. But when was the last time menstruation was at the forefront of any work of art, I found myself wondering as I read. When was the last time I encountered menstruation in literature? For this reader, it has been exceedingly rare. In Wave of Blood, however, we are continually reminded that the book’s speaker bleeds. Throughout the text, the cyclically bleeding body continues to enter like a sort of chorus, a fugue, insistent, a B-side providing crucial context, a bodily refrain. 
This is not the first time Reines has written with and through blood. In her first poetry collection, The Cow, animal blood and organs and viscera, the animal as commodity, the blood-stained apparatus of the factory farm, are front and center. I remember being shocked by that book. Scared, in a good way. So much so that it began to rearrange the way I thought about poetry. It made me want to be braver, less concerned with beauty for beauty’s sake, more interested in the transcendent qualities within that which might at first may seem grotesque.
“I’m bleeding,” Reines writes in Wave of Blood. “I don't know why whenever anything important or difficult is happening this seems to be the case. Too much meaning for words—the rest pours out of my body.” To bleed is “a way to give myself absolutely to this world… or, it’s how I give life.” Menstruation is a “sense flooding;” elsewhere, “an immense vulnerability hangover” that leaves one feeling “soft, fat, exposed;” “a moment of extreme liquidity, a liquid state” that “puts you in a different world.” Invoking the womb’s “heavily shamed testimony,” Reines fantasizes about what would have happened if a philosopher like Foucault had documented the cultural history of menstruation with as much detail and energy as he’d put into his histories of “sexuality, madness, and punishment.”
The menstrual cycle is also figured as an organic mechanism against forgetting: “it's fitting that I’m bleeding as I write you,” Reines writes in an epistolary passage who addressee, besides us, the readers, is unnamed, “because otherwise I’d forget — the way I always want to — the way I do every month.” Throughout the text, Reines is concerned with questions of remembering and forgetting. Her speaker is frequently haunted by history, but seems to hold this haunting alongisde a sense of the sacred — because to be haunted is to remember, to continuously remember, which is a way of working against both historical erasures and the attention-crisis of the digital information economy, where knowing seems to slip by at lightning speed into forgetting. Here, menstruation may be a haunting but it is also a welcoming reminder of what endures. Menstruation is the body’s clock, it is the sense of time. A bleeding body may temporarily forget it bleeds but is always, inevitably reminded. Here, the menstrual cycle is embodied history, deep time living in the human form. “Why doesn’t the earth say something?” Reines asks, then immediately answers herself: “But it does. In your body.” 
Menstruation is a time when the body is, as Reines describes, extra-sensitized, “like a steak.” To menstruate is to constantly undergo a process of change and shedding — in a cyclical fashion, like a serpent (I think of the animated ouroboros which is the digital logo for Reines’ study group Invisible College). It’s an oracular and alchemical process, to write from the bleeding of not only the body but of the historical moment. Menstruation in Wave of Blood is figured in a complex, transpersonal web of meaning. 
Wave of Blood is an exceedingly brave, ferocious project, whose speaker chooses to look at things that she would rather look away from. When you choose to look, Reines reminds us, that is where you find the magic, the rich depths, life’s full picture. Even if to look, like Orpheus, means to bear witness to ruin. But to to bear witness to ruin, and to bear the associated pain, means to expand your capacity for sight — to do as Reines’ speaker is compelled to do by a mysterious voice in her poem “Dream” (from A Sand Book): “MAGNIFY MY EYE / MAGNIFY MY EYE / MAGNIFY MY SURFACES’ CAPACITY FOR BEAUTY.”
This book is a project that puts us directly in touch with the visceral heart of being human, whether or not we are ready for it, “voluptuous & sometimes agonizing as it is.” For blood is what runs through us, it is the substance of our aliveness.
It’s a truism to say that menstruation is a taboo, as is writing about menstruation. People who menstruate are taught to keep it hidden. The blood is at best, an inconvenience, and at worst, dangerous—a portal to lunacy, hysteria, rage. We don’t want to look at blood, but in Reines’ text we have no choice. The reader of Reines’ urgent and dazzling work is compelled to witness blood—the blood spilled at the hands of settler colonialism and white supremacy in the United States, Palestine, and beyond, as well as the blood spilled monthly by menstruating bodies. All of this together: the blood that so often goes unspoken, the blood that is invisibilized.