Anybody
Poems
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“Ari Banias is one of the best living poets, and this book in your hands is our proof. Anybody is the courage of a poet who trusts the strength of poetry to make room in our world for everybody.” —CAConrad
In Anybody, Ari Banias takes up questions of recognition and belonging: how boundaries are drawn and managed, the ways he and she, us and them, here and elsewhere are kept separate, and at what cost identities and selves are forged. Moving through iconic and imagined landscapes, Anybody confronts the strangeness of being alive and of being a restlessly gendered, queer, emotive body. Wherever the poet turns—the cruising spaces of Fire Island, a city lake, a Greek island, a bodega-turned-coffee-shop—he finds the charge of boundedness and signification, the implications of what it means to be a this instead of a that. Witty, tender, and original, these poems pierce the constructs that define our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his lyrical debut, Banias looks into corners of human existence often left unconsidered, acting as a Virgil to the reader's Dante while calmly and surely traversing uncertain spaces. He finds extraordinary commonalities among these spaces, akin to how one finds in almost any kitchen a "large plastic bag/ with slightly smaller mashed-together/ plastic bags inside it." Though Banias's poems are ever skeptical of static identity, gender, and privilege, he writes with a certainty of voice that inspires trust even as the locations of the poems stretch from the liminal to ignorable: cruising spaces, restrooms, a polluted lake, a surgical room for a double mastectomy. Memories of childhood and family are neither saturated with nostalgia nor mined for their traumas, but rather reexamined for renewed context from the perspective of a very different adult seeking to discover something new in them. Signifiers such as names are seen as incomplete: "Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under/ while the rain skims the front of me." There's a meditation on pockets "dreams of negative/ space" which by the end of the poem come to mean something like the freedom to keep personal secrets. Banias ends his fine book with an appeal: "Do we, ought we/ to care? For one another, yes."
