P A I N
Buy it from Amazon.com
"Christopher Reiner’s stories or prose poems—I’m not sure how to classify them—are subtle and psychologically astute, fascinating. They draw you in with their apparent simplicity, but it is into a conundrum, a riddle always just beyond your understanding. They leave you wanting more—not more from them but more like them."
--Rae Armantrout
FROM THE BACK COVER:
In Pain, writer, editor and filmmaker Christopher Reiner offers a contemporary version of Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, retaining all the subtlety, perverse charm, and withering social commentary of the original—and even managing to sneak in the angels and devils that were his forerunner’s specialty. As with the great French poet, Reiner presents a world where bourgeois hypocrisy and emotional alienation stem more from laziness and boredom than from any active (ideological) passion. But what shocks the reader here is no longer Baudelaire’s transgressive subject matter (after all, this is the 21st century) but the discovery that screwy logic and grim nihilism can still achieve such seductive expression (after all, this is safe, rational, moralistic America). “If there’s a devil, his force is to hold us back, to convince us to resist taking part, to keep us quiet and worried.”
If Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen had been written by an avant-garde filmmaker living in modern-day Hollywood, what kind of text would it be? A sequence of narratives carefully covering their own footprints? A series of jokes told skillfully enough to avoid their own punch lines? Would it be filled with the kind of self-deflating subversion that so skillfully fills the pages of Chris Reiner’s Pain? “Originally, when the aliens came down, they let us ask for specific things we wanted. But they were so depressed by what we asked for that they made us forget it ever happened and they started giving us what they assumed we needed. So it’s only partly their fault that they were all wrong.” Reading Pain is like trying not to laugh in a movie theater where everyone else is weeping. --Stephen-Paul Martin
Christopher Reiner’s Pain casts itself into the world then examines whatever has stuck to its line of questioning. His self is a flitting hybrid, a cross between Andre´ Breton and Garrison Keillor, taking its queasy measure in relation to the received messages of the culture around it. “Start to see uneasy between this person and yourself.” In Pain ‘happy’ is not assumed to be a good thing. Reiner’s philosophical gems don’t shine from a place of easy entitlement. Pain is a question in constant revision and the answer, like pieces of an almost-solved puzzle, lunges in and out of view. --Diane Ward
OGLING ANCHOR
Buy it from Amazon.com
"The quiet fierceness of Ogling Anchor reaches us from that distance where it may no longer be possible to write the disaster that must be written anyway. Not demanding an attention that's never going to arrive, these poems continue nonetheless in their necessary seriousness, addressing themselves to our viciously real contemporary darkness in which poetry can become only the defeat by which we save ourselves. The poems in Ogling Anchor are whispers silenced by the roar, and as such, the only sort of sound worth hearing." --Mark Wallace