A SYMMETRY NOW IN PAPERBACK
Winner of the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature
PRESS
The New York Times Book Review
ORDERS
PRAISE For A SYMMETRY
“If every book of poetry, from now until the end—or the terminal twisting—of time, were to offer itself as a field guide to the apocalypse by attrition in which we are living, in which we are forcing each other to live, then I would nominate Ari Banias’s A Symmetry to be among the books that we consult first. In its clear and capacious inventory of the inter- and codependence of what feels like the fullness and failing of all things, Banias’s poetry is transcribing a kind of vigilance that is mournful yet magnetizing, altruistic yet self-adhesive, and always enflowered by the daily uprising of new manifestations of love.” —Brandon Shimoda
“’Refuse the difference between sameness and difference.’ Refuse the possibility that saying it all on a song won’t change the baseline of what happened. Ari Banias’ poetry sits in an abandoned chair under the overpass, atop an ‘oil slick on the Aegean’ looking ‘at, not through’ reality’s immeasurables that the poet is called to count, holding it all in mind so we can also hold it. A T-shirt hanging out the window, ‘scratched glass Fanta bottles filled and refilled,’ ‘the ruined tanneries beside the seawall’—when you add everything up x times x, what do you get? Only the precarious balance of the world, and a trust in that voice of A Symmetry earned with each self-deflecting playful flourish. The paper antiquity of NYC coffee cups & ‘A doric column / squatting in a strip mall’ & ‘the discotheque / painted tourist pink with a classical name’ evoke the churn of some perpetual history whose action-reaction is embodied in the motion of lyrical meter and the news reports this book takes apart. The poet calls it: ‘A yellow butterfly that has no interest in me. / I have no interest in kings.’ Such cosmic foreshortening disembarrasses the poem from imperial valence until all that’s left of the book is ‘just the tree.’ When Ari Banias says ‘don’t be sorry for the future sand / this stone wall will become’ one can almost let it go. Almost.” —Ana Božičević
“In A Symmetry, Ari Banias attunes to unacquainted frequencies with great precision and extraordinary craft gauging the flow, intensity, and impact of sensuality—alternating between brutal excesses and incalculable joys. Every line holds. Reading this book is like feeling gravity. One walks unaware of the pull until the incline’s encounter.” —Gregg Bordowitz
“The surge, the swell, and the casual mutability of the borders and breaks that ensconce our world are laid bare in A Symmetry, Ari Banias’s incandescent new collection of poems. Early on, these pieces acknowledge the transmutable, shifting world— acknowledge the indecency of anything that purports to be static and staid. Even the I is the I only as long as it resists all other possible orientations. Banias ingests the discrete, itinerant minutes, which makes his work come alive at the edges, the thresholds, and the charged moment where distance can finally collapse. The continuous jostling is generous, though. In it we remember the permutations that have existed, do exist, and that will exist in the future. Near the end of A Symmetry, Banias ropes “a brief fish / netted / partly recovered / the sweat of a horse / the wet of its eye.” These objects are momentarily linked and next time we see them, their potential will likely be revealed in an entirely new arrangement. This is one way to see—what taut instructions Banias has given us.” —Asiya Wadud
“These poems are a talisman I want to wear around my neck, an eye that wards off evil by looking at what’s before it with unflinching commitment and devotion. Awake to possibility and care in the half-light of our belated era, they give this reader shelter from ‘the structures crumbling’ around us. Bursting with energy and attention and love — this book offers us the world.”—Eleni Sikelianos
ANYBODY
PRESS
ORDERS
PRAISE FOR ANYBODY
“Ari Banias’s Anybody is a book that acknowledges a boundary, escapes it, and redefines it.” —Lambda Literary
“One of the most unique voices I have ever heard in a first book…through all its interstates of narrative, candor, and image, [Anybody] presents an intersectional cross section of the American lyric, providing the reader with many occasions for joy, for remembering, for ‘time to quiet down.’” —Kenyon Review
“To speak any truth that can resonate beyond the particularities of their position, a poet must understand every particularity of that position, and all the forces that intersect to determine their view of the world. Banias is such a poet. It is questions about what constitutes the lyric and the universal…that drive his debut collection forward, and his readers into a more expansive, fully considered future.” —Fanzine
“This collection takes quick-witted brushstrokes as it tackles societal boundaries, then slows down to meditate on the minutiae of the spaces that define us and the inaccessible spaces, too…[Anybody] can be read in one existential sitting, but it begs to be reread many times over.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Ari Banias is one of the best living poets and this book in your hands is our proof. ‘If only we didn’t / care about what doesn’t matter / but people do.’ This book Anybody is the courage of a poet who trusts the strength of poetry to make room in our world for everybody. I am grateful for the work of Banias, always pointing us toward what does matter.” —CA Conrad
“I’m so impressed by the range and grace of Ari Banias’ Anybody. It’s discursive, straight-talking, and thinky, then ghostlike, elliptical, and mischievous. It takes its time, then rushes; it’s quiet, then bold; it’s steeped in sociality, then ringing with solitude. I happily recognize its arrival, even if I know (as does Banias, quoting Berlant) that recognition may be but the misrecognition we can bear.” —Maggie Nelson
“Born late in the 20th century, tutored under the twin suns of Frank O’Hara and Guillaume Apollinaire, vexed by ‘this set of meanings on my body,’ Ari Banias is a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful and cracklingly alive, a citizen of the possible. How many utopias? (keep imagining them).” —Mark Doty
“Here is I—by turns diving board, dividing line, high-wire, splinter, stitched pocket, and, above all, Imagination. Here is Anybody with its syntax of rupture and suture, its restless questions and metaphysical balloons. What a thrilling, original, generous, openhearted book. A book we have waited for, whoever we are.” —Donna Masini
“Large, inclusive, funny, tough, nuanced, skeptical—and especially skeptical about his own persona—Ari Banias has written one of the finest first books (OK, any book!) that I’ve ever read…These poems stake a claim on the future: they give us a poet who understands to the bone how syntax and line and music embody emotion, and how the integrity of the spirit is the maker’s integrity in going all the way to the bottom of these poems’ large and important subjects.” —Tom Sleigh