It is framed by several excerpted texts, including a guide to bovine carcass disposal, as well as the Bible, and works by Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, and Marguerite Duras, a structure which Reines has described as "passing all of literature through a hamburger helper.
I feel like after God died, the cow became the onlooker in great works of modernism...it's like the residue of the divine in the twentieth century.
"[20] Coeur de Lion (Mal-o-Mar, 2007; reissued by Fence Books, 2011) is a book-length poem addressed to an elusive, fractured, "you," who Reines has stated constitutes "the 'you' of YouTube and advertising...what the impoverished 'I' is made of.
It is based on The Telephone Book: Technology — Schizophrenia — Electric Speech by philosopher Avital Ronell, and has been described as an "inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play" and "not for everyone".
[22] The second act of Telephone was expanded into a short piece entitled Miss St.'s Hieroglyphic Suffering, and was presented as part of The Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series in November 2009, again starring Birgit Huppuch.
Its five sections each begin with alchemical symbols, which, according to B. K. Fisher, writing for the Boston Review, places the reader "in a realm where the transmutation of materials is an analogy for personal purification and esoteric or spiritual quest.
"[24] A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019) is a psychedelic meditation on climate change, violence, peacocks, Paul Celan, surveillance, the sun, the occult, Judaism, time travel, the dissolution of language, and more.