Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2022 Publishing Triangle Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Award
A thrilling, discursive second collection from “a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive” (Mark Doty).
Trade Review"Expansive... Banias's chief strength as a poet lies in observation... In this memorable work, Banias offers readers a guide to seeing the world, and its incongruences, more clearly." -- Publishers Weekly
"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, author of The Grave on the Wall
"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, holding it all in mind so we can also hold it. . . . The paper antiquity of NYC coffee cups and ‘A doric column / squatting in a strip mall’ and ‘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 Božicevic, author of JOMO
"In
A Symmetry, Ari Banias attunes to unacquainted frequencies with great precision and extraordinary craft.… Every line holds. Reading this book is like feeling gravity. One walks unaware of the pull until the incline’s encounter" -- Gregg Bordowitz, author of Volition and Tenement
