Anybody

by Ari Banias

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355444
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/20/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,143,659
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review and the Nation, among other publications. He lives in Oakland, California.

Table of Contents

1

Some Kind of We 3

At Any Given Moment 5

Narrative 8

Wilder 10

On Pockets 11

Giant Snowballs 13

Who You're About to be 14

Grandchild 16

An Arrow 17

Solve For X 19

Close 21

One Possible Reading Among Many 23

Villagers 25

Morphology 26

Double Mastectomy 28

The Flattened Grass that Holds Your Shape 29

The Men 31

Being with You Makes Me Think About 34

2

Exquisite Corpse 39

The Feeling 41

Prairie Restoration Project 43

To the God of Sobriety 45

Handshake 46

A Sunset 49

Your Wild Domesticated Inner Life 50

Where We Sit Watching 52

Wedding 55

Enough 56

Who Is Ghost 59

A Version 60

Aren't We 62

Gay Bars 64

Hog 66

3

Bouquet 71

Find Love in Brooklyn Now! 73

The Hole 75

Still Here 77

Authentic City 79

Volley 80

Horizontal 82

Recognition is the Misrecognition You Can Bear 84

Various Attentions All Landing Like Birds into the Same Tree and Thrilling There Some Minutes at Dusk 87

Dot Not Dot 89

No More Birds 91

Acknowledgments 93

Notes 95

Editorial Reviews

"[Anybody] is the portrait of an inner life that asks itself steadily how anybody or any body can be said to be anybody—girl, boy, fox…This charming, chattering young self is preoccupied with…poignant absences."

American Poets

"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

"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

"Banias poses questions of identity and belonging in his striking debut…In lines alternately straight-talking and philosophical, Banias asks what it means to be ‘a white dude’ in our country, to be educated and privileged but still ‘a fake man.’"

San Francisco Chronicle

"Ari Banias’s Anybody is a book that acknowledges a boundary, escapes it, and redefines it."

Lambda Literary

"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

"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

08/15/2016
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.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"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."

Tom Sleigh

"Born late in the twentieth 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