A Symmetry
112 pages | paperback |
Ā
Winner of the 2022 Publish Triangle Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Award
A thrilling, discursive second collection from āa poet for this hourābewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly aliveā (Mark Doty).
The poems in Ari Baniasās thrilling and discursive second collection,Ā A Symmetry, unsettle the myth of a benevolently ordered reality. Through uncanny repetitions and elliptical inquiry, Banias contends with the inscriptions of nationhood, language, and ancestral memory in the architectures of daily experience.
Refusing the nostalgias of classicism and the trap of authenticity, these poems turn instead to a Greece of garbage strikes and throwaway tourist pleasures, where bad gender means bad grammar, and a California coast where mansions offer themselves to be crushed under your thumb. A piece of citrus hurled into one poemās apartment window rolls downhill and escapes the narrative altogether in another. Farmers destroy their own olive trees, strangers mesmerize us as they fold sheets into perfect corners, āartists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they āleave politics out of it.āā Climate collapse and debt accelerate, and desire transforms itself in the ruins.
From within psychic interiors and iconic sitesāthe museum, the strip mall, the discotheque, the seaāA SymmetryĀ attends to the intimate, social proportions of our material world and discerns the simmering potential of a present that ācan be some other way. And is.ā