Ari Banias
Visiting Poet
“Some men are women too / the way a mountain is land and a harbor is land and a parking lot / Refuse the difference between sameness and difference” writes Ari Banias in the first poem of his most recent collection, A Symmetry (W.W. Norton, 2021). Much of his work takes place in that rich, artful between-space. Teasing out the philosophical reflections enmeshed in mundane observations, the poems in A Symmetry offer intimate scenes of the speaker's life woven through intrusions of systemic oppression and environmental destruction. There is lyricism in his descriptions of the natural world and human connection, but also an unflinching look at an ominous violence: “my fingers in you / and your face while I do that / mythic and ancient face of centuries / comedy tragedy / microplastics buried imperceptibly in / the face I can’t completely / hold the / face I love.”
Whereas his first book, Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2018) explored recognition and belonging and how we forge boundaries to contain our selves, A Symmetry is a negotiation of that which flows into and beyond those outlines: alive and ever-shifting, these poems capture stills from the unending motion of meaning-making. Banias writes, “Across the courtyard, this T-shirt on a hanger out the window / turns in the light breeze as if trying to look behind itself.” His writing is a fresh injection of mutability in a rigid world.
Banias’ work has been featured in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, American Poetry Review, and Triple Canopy, among others. He has been the recipient of multiple prestigious fellowships, including from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A Symmetry won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature.
Banias will read at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, October 29, 2024 at 7 p.m. Livestreams will be available on BDPC Facebook and YouTube pages.