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WORK TITLE: Anybody: Poems
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.aribanias.com/
CITY: nrkeley
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ari-banias * https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/awards/annual/winners/2014/award_3/ * http://www.aribanias.com/bio/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Los Angeles, CA.
EDUCATION:Sarah Lawrence College, B.A.; Hunter College, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and poet. Was a teaching fellow at Hunter College; has worked in bookstores.
AWARDS:Campbell Corner Prize, 2012; Cultural Center of Cape Cod Poetry Prize, 2012; Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America, 2014; recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program.
WRITINGS
Author of the chapbook What’s Personal is Being Here With All of You. Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2012. Contributor to anthologies, including Collective Brightness, Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011; and Troubling The Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, EOAGH Books/Nightboat Books, 2013. Poems appear in periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Guernica, the Offing, Poetry, Subtropics, Sycamore Review, and the Volta; also as part of the exhibition “Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects.”
SIDELIGHTS
Ari Banias grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, and he is the author of a chapbook titled What’s Personal is Being Here With All of You. His first collection of poetry is titled Anybody: Poems. Commenting on the collection’s title in an interview with Lambda Literary Web site contributor Tennessee Jones, Manias noted: “I’m interested in where we touch and overlap. Unexpectedly. I don’t want to presume who will or won’t find themselves in my poems. I mean anybody as an invitation to inhabit space, to fill this blank. Anybody signifies a zone of possibility between nobody and somebody, and seems to me malleable, up for grabs.”
Identity, sense of self, recognition, belonging, and boundaries are themes common found Banias’s poetry. Banias, who identifies the transgender community, writes about how identities and selves are formed as boundaries are created and nurtured to separate all types of people. This estrangement and/or belong range from women and men to gays and straights to the more generalized “us” and “them.” Even within identified groups, boundaries exist as shown in the poem titled “The Men.” Banias sets the poem in a gay vacation getaway named Fire Island. The poem’s narrator notes: “It seems necessary to say I watch them. / It seems necessary: them. This distance / between us.” Banners also addresses the idea of names, writing in one poem: “Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under/ while the rain skims the front of me.”
Banias addresses the experience of transgender surgery in the poem titled “Double Mastectomy,” in which he focuses on the surgical room experience writing: “Glided straight toward that white / room. As if / approaching from within / a dense wood.” In his interview with Lambda Literary Web site contributor Jones, Banias said he had not previous intended to write about such a surgery “given the fascination so many non-trans people have about our bodies.” Banners went on to tell Jones he did not want “to reinforce a voyeuristic trope.” However, he also noted in the Lambda Literary Web site interview: “At the same time, I’d initiated a profound physical intervention, chosen and deeply desired by me, that I also had complicated feelings about, among them, grief – as well as the strong sense I wasn’t supposed to cop to this grief.”
Banias turns his attention to the political and questioning of the government in some of his poems. Writingin in a poem titled “The Feeling,” Banias observes: “But someone pays the police. We do. / That we are meant to believe the poem can say moon / but not government. Both have flags.” Commenting on this poem and the political in Anybody, Lambda Literary Web site contributor Christopher Soto remarked: “Anybody does not position the political against the poetic, therefore allowing more opportunities for what the poem can be.” Soto noted in the Lambda Literary Web site review that Banias also writes about”the everyday, the seemingly boring,” such as in one poem in which Banias remarks: “I don’t care what’s expected and I’m probably not doing it right… a handshake is awkward / a hug is too.”
Banias is also concered with location and the environment that surrounds people. In one poem titled “DOT DOT DOT,” he writes: “smell the eucalyptus reminiscent of cat piss. / Glance with me into the cardboard box at the discarded khakis / and rollerblade suitcase, and touch my shoulder. This is the key / broken off inside my card door in desperation by a stranger.” Banias’s poems not only address the strangeness of being queer and restlessly gendered but also the general incongruities of just being alive. From a Greek island to a coffee shop, Banias identifies the boundaries of self and the significance of being one thing or another.
Anybody “can be read in one existential sitting, but it begs to be reread many times over,” noted Chicago Review of Books Web site contributor Neyat Yohannes, adding: “Depending on your disposition going into Anybody, a new truth can be unlocked every time you pick it up.” A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “In his lyrical debut, Banias looks into corners of human existence often left unconsidered.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Banias, Ari, Anybody: Poems, W.W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 2016
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, August 15, 2016, review of Anybody, p. 46.
ONLINE
Ari Banais Home Page, http://www.aribanias.com (May 25, 2017).
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (November 2, 2016 ), Neyat Yohannes, “Ari Banias Unlocks the Truth in Anybody.”
Lambda Literary, http://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (October 24, 2016), Tennessee Jones, “Ari Manias: On His New Poetry Collection and Trans Representation in the Larger Culture”; (February 26, 2017), Christopher Soto, review of Anybody.
Poets & Writers Web site, https://www.pw.org/ (May 25, 2017), author profile.*
Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, September 2016). He was born in Los Angeles, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and currently lives in Berkeley, CA. He holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, where he was a teaching fellow. The author of a chapbook, What’s Personal is Being Here With All of You (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2012), his poems appear in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Guernica, The Offing, Poetry, The Volta, and as part of the exhibition Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects. He is the recipient of the 2014 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2012 Campbell Corner Prize, and has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program.
Ari Banias
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Berkeley, CA
Website:
aribanias.com
Author's Bio
Ari Banias is the author of Anybody, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in September 2016. He was born in Los Angeles, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and currently lives in Berkeley, CA. He holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, where he was a teaching fellow. The author of a chapbook, What’s Personal is Being Here With All of You (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2012), his poems appear in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, FIELD, Guernica, The Offing, The Volta, and as part of the exhibition Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects. He is the recipient of the 2014 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2012 Campbell Corner Prize, and has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship program.
Publications and Prizes
Anthologies:
Collective Brightness (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011)
, Troubling The Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (EOAGH Books/Nightboat Books, 2013)
Journals:
Arts & Letters, Aufgabe, Cincinnati Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Drunken Boat, EOAGH, Field, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, Mid-American Review, MiPOesias, Salt Hill Journal, Subtropics, Sycamore Review
Prizes Won:
Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America (2014), Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (2012), Cultural Center of Cape Cod Poetry Prize (2012)
More Information
Listed as:
Poet
Gives readings:
Yes
Travels for readings:
Yes
Identifies as:
G/L/B/T
Prefers to work with:
Any
Fluent in:
English
Born in:
Los Angeles
Raised in:
IL
Ari Banias: On His New Poetry Collection and Trans Representation in the Larger Culture
by Tennessee Jones
October 24, 2016
A poetry book ten years in the making, Ari Banias’s stunning Anybody tackles questions of relatability and difference. The collection deftly navigates the strangeness of living, the significance of place, and the implications of belonging.
From the publisher:
[H]ow 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.
Banias has held fellowships with Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He currently lives in Berkeley California. Lambda’s Tennessee Jones sat down with Banias to discuss the book, whiteness, and writing while trans.
My interpretation of the title of the book, Anybody, is you’d like to suggest (not universality), but that the commonality we all share is the fact of being here together, on this planet, sharing experiences in one way or another. I’m curious how your thoughts and experience of whiteness informed how you conceived of these poems.
Exactly! Looking at the experience of being here together outside of the concept of the universal was on my mind. I thought a lot about my whiteness in writing and titling Anybody. Because I’m white, it’s often assumed my poems aren’t thinking about race, or that my entry point for “difference” will be through my being trans. I want to resist that. Whenever the concept of universality pops up my alarm bells go off. I think of how the unnamed default of whiteness has been inherent in ideas of universality and humanness, and how that default is an erasure tied to projects of actual, material erasure—displacement, colonization, war, slavery, mass incarceration…. So for me, a white person, to say anybody (or everybody), to say commonality, to say we –all of these feel extremely loaded. And important. It’s important to keep trying to say them, even while stumbling, and to mean something that directly opposes the kind of erasure I name above.
I’m interested in where we touch and overlap. Unexpectedly. I don’t want to presume who will or won’t find themselves in my poems. I mean anybody as an invitation to inhabit space, to fill this blank. Anybody signifies a zone of possibility between nobody and somebody, and seems to me malleable, up for grabs. The anonymity in that word also lends it a sense of the plural. Which is something I was working through in this book–the being-with and the being-apartness of sociality, of being a body in the world. Whiteness, and assumptions readers might make about who is speaking or spoken to, comes up for me a lot around this word we, which has been central to the making of many of these poems.
When I use we, I’m conscious that speaking this pronoun as a white person might affect how and with whom it resonates. Some of my we’s read very specifically as white we’s or American we’s, often, these are indictments; some we’s are trans, are queer; some are a split I; some a self and their beloved. And some are unspecified, wide, more generally available for identification. We aspires, is utopian. I hope, in general, that my work throws elbows out and enlarges space; I want we’s that make room. But we can narrow, be exclusive, fascistic, violent. There’s a poem in the book in which white settlers appear, and as I was writing it, I wanted so much to use the pronoun them, to dis-identify. To do so would’ve been an abdication of responsibility, so in the end I decided to say us. This seemed terrible to me, but true.
We feels risky to use which is why I use it–always, I hope, fully considering its stakes coming from this body. To say we is to wield a weighted thing; it calls for attentiveness, calls up questions. We implies a them, and I can’t always know where you are in this equation. Have I alienated you? Are you “with” me? Are you part of a Them that wants me to believe my we is imagined, that I’m alone? Have we been coopted? Are they telling us who or how to be; can a poem cut holes in these borders estranging us from each other?
You’ve worked on different forms of this collection for ten years. What sustained you during this period?
Unnameable Books, the poetry section of Unnameable Books, the cheese at Park Slope Food Coop, doubles on Flatbush, Prospect Park, Hatches Harbor, The Old Colony, Roberto Bolaño, Agnes Varda, Frank Ocean, Frank O’Hara, my teachers, my parents, my enemies, my crushes, my failures, distractions, obsessions, delusion, showing up, bad puns, phone calls, windows, Cape Cod’s inter-library loan system, small accommodations strangers make at the laundromat, eye contact on the subway, overheard conversations, things people leave on the curb, Samos honey, Cherry Grove, Ruthie’s, lavender, anger, rocks, earplugs, sweat pants, rembetika, G. M. Hopkins, Rukeyser’s “The Fear of Poetry,” free healthcare through the state of Massachusetts, three fellowships, one grant, teaching, not teaching, femininity, long walks on the goddamn beach, and the minds and faces of my extraordinary hilarious generous friends.
The poem “Double Mastectomy,” calls to mind for me an almost fairy-tale like telling of the experience: “the creaking house we lived in / that hundred-year-old matron” and later, “Glided straight toward that white / room. As if / approaching from within / a dense wood” It is by far the most telling (and accurate) description of top surgery I’ve read. How did you come to this approach? It’s vastly different from work by trans writers that details the bodily mechanisms of experiences of transness.
I didn’t intend to write about surgery. It seemed a subject to steer clear of, given the fascination so many non-trans people have about our bodies. The last thing I wanted was to reinforce a voyeuristic trope. At the same time, I’d initiated a profound physical intervention, chosen and deeply desired by me, that I also had complicated feelings about, among them, grief – as well as the strong sense I wasn’t supposed to cop to this grief. I felt, as many do, an obligation (for the sake of concerned family, as well as in light of the skepticism directed at trans people who take charge over their own bodies) to outwardly present my surgery as certain, as perfectly aligned with “finally making my body right”–as if it had been unequivocally wrong before, as if a body in itself could be wrong. So then of course writer-me comes in like, Oh, I’m not supposed to write about that? I’m definitely going to write about that. It was around this time I learned my childhood home had been demolished, so suddenly my sense of loss of two historic bodies, that had each in its way housed me, merged, felt inevitable.
The wonderful poem “One Possible Reading Among Many” ends with this: “To learn to see beyond my seeing/ I need to admit everything.” This is a vastly important statement. Can you talk about what you mean by it?
Thanks. I was thinking of parameters, confines, frames. Of the voids in childhood, and the sinking feeling that what lies ahead is a more calcified version of “this.” I can remember learning how to hold my face, and my body, in certain ways. I think of being told “don’t be so emotional.” Of learning, cue by cue, to think of myself as inherently separate from others. And what kind of person, and by extension what kind of world, these swallowed lessons add up to. In poems, I long to get outside the ways culture has directed me to see myself, others, and the world; at the same time, I feel compelled to describe the terms of this seeing. As for “seeing beyond [our] seeing,” I believe our ability to survive depends on trying to do that, fraught as our tools are, difficult as it may be. In that last line, “admit” is working in two senses. To divulge, and to allow in. I mean admission porously. I mean to be exposed, and to expose.
Trans representation in the larger culture has changed so much in an extremely short period of time. I’m thinking, right now, of how when I started grad school in 2007, I wasn’t out to my classmates because I didn’t want to deal with the possibility of entertaining other people’s ignorance. This fall, I went back to school, and both schools I’m attending in New York have gender-neutral bathrooms. I burst into tears when I saw this, thinking of all the years I spent trying to hide myself when I wasn’t in my immediate community. Has this sudden change affected your writing in the last few years? Have you experienced any emotional whiplash?
That’s beautiful about the bathrooms. And I know what you mean. That the freedom to use a bathroom without fear is so moving is also just such an indication of how far the culture has yet to go. In terms of representation, my first thought is that it still feels sadly necessary to state the obvious–that trans lives being accounted for in media and even in infrastructure, has not resulted in the day to day existence of most trans people being freer, safer, affirmed. Representation can come as a relief, feel good (or, sorta good), and dammit I want us to feel good. To be a subject rather than an object of pity or fascination, to be seen complexly, or to represent ourselves (watch out!) is undoubtedly meaningful. Ultimately though it’s hard for me to get truly excited about greater media visibility when trans people are routinely & disproportionately murdered, policed, harassed, incarcerated; denied housing, jobs, health care; misgendered and misnamed; barred access to basic public services; still overwhelmingly stigmatized. And overwhelmingly bearing the brunt of this violence are trans women, poor and low-income trans people, trans people of color. Trans visibility, while it can yield support for things like gender-neutral bathrooms, has also left more people targeted for violence. So there’s been this huge shift: we are now mentionable–some of us, sometimes. A kind of currency. But we have always existed, worthless and worthy. This shiny moment shinier for some has a history. Well before the specter/promise of respectability, trans people have been organizing and fighting. A half-century (at least) of determined struggle has made this cultural shift begin to happen.
How this impacts my writing is hard to know yet. I will say I feel less need to spell out or contextualize transness, and a growing desire to give voice to other aspects of experience & embodiment in my poems. Probably, I’m sort of poised in anticipation of a spotlighting of my transness. So my feeling is, let’s bring some other things into that spotlight–let’s bring in whiteness and critique of it, femininity, class, humor, let’s bring constructs of landscape, romance, loneliness, power, let’s bring immigration, proximity, place, let’s bring anger and doubt.
You’ve had incredible success as a poet, in terms of being able to make a living as a writer. Can you give some advice to people who are trying to make their way doing this?
The problem of earning a living as a poet, and in the long term, is one I’m still figuring out. For the better part of fifteen years I’ve worked in bookstores or with books, teaching some of that time. I’ve taken jobs that allowed me to write outside them, and I say no a lot. Fellowships have sustained me materially for substantial periods, and have been invaluable for the intimate writing friendships that began there. Always, having one or two sharp, honest readers of my work has been essential.
Now, corny Dad advice: identify what sustains you as a writer, where you get energy, who makes this feel possible, and do whatever you can to prioritize these in your life. If your time is extremely limited, protect the intervals and spaces where writing can happen. Be as viscous as you must about this. Leave your phone. Be what they might call unavailable; say no to hanging out with the friend who drains you. Do all you can to not hinge your sense of worth on institutional praise–and the institution takes many forms; a scene can be an institution. In my experience, writing is a courting of uncertainty, often lonely, often unsexy, mostly frustrating, mostly failure. I don’t know why the hell I do it, but then it has its small odd satisfactions, its rare ecstasies, and I remember.
- See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/10/24/ari-banias-on-his-new-poetry-collection-and-trans-representation-in-the-larger-culture/#sthash.S0Xuw0YB.dpuf
Anybody: Poems
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Anybody: Poems
Ari Banias. Norton, $25 (96p) ISBN 978-0-393-24779-4
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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Anybody: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 46+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444508&it=r&asid=69bd4df61a0ee4c98b57d5b18ea5ce70. Accessed 3 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461444508
‘Anybody’ by Ari Banias
Review by Christopher Soto
February 26, 2017
Ari Banias’ Anybody is a book that acknowledges a boundary, escapes it, and redefines it. In Anybody, names and identity markers become flexible. Banias writes, “Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under / while rain skims the front of me.” To name something is to fail its essence. The child you once named a girl is actually a boy. The boy that you once named white is actually trying to understand what it means to be a Greek-American, what it means to battle assimilation and the loss of Greek language. There is a constant entering and exiting of naming and categorizing, which complicates perceptions of identity throughout Banias’ debut poetry collection Anybody.
In one of my favorite instances, the speaker is having an insider/outsider experience with identity. The poem “The Men,” takes place on the ultra-gay vacation getaway, Fire Island. Banias writes, “It seems necessary to say I watch them. / It seems necessary: them. This distance / between us. How at times it can shrink, then grow.” How can the speaker both be a part of “them” and separate from “them?,” the poem asks us. How do identity and language shift depending on their proximity to others? This book traverses not only identities but geographical locations too, from Fire Island to New York City to the Bay Area, where Banias currently resides.
When I think about Banias and poets currently living in the Bay Area, I cannot help but think about Solmaz Sharif. Both poets studied at Stanford together as part of the Stegner Fellowship. There are certain lines of poetry by Banias which make me think about Sharif and the culture of political consciousness that I’m sure both of these poets have cultivated together. For example, Banias in the poem “The Feeling” questions the government, saying “But someone pays the police. We do. / That we are meant to believe the poem can say moon / but not government. Both have flags.” This welcoming of politically centered writing reminds me of Sharif, whose new manuscript Look uses words from the U.S. Department of Defense’s dictionary to question the state. Anybody does not position the political against the poetic, therefore allowing more opportunities for what the poem can be. Another line that has stayed with me from Banias’ debut is in the poem “Recognition is the Misrecognition You Can Bear” where he states, “Now I’m standing at the edge of this lake / Ohlone fished then white settlers turned / into a sewer.” Again, Banias’ work questions and challenges what might be perceived by many as common knowledge. The lake, in the Bay Area, which has been attributed to the settler state is actually taken from the Ohlone. The process of making the visible that which is invisible, is to allow its existence. Banias creates visibility and nuance to his subjects throughout the book.
Banias also writes of the everyday, the seemingly boring (a handshake or a balloon become topics of poems). Banias writes, “I don’t care what’s expected and I’m probably not doing it right… a handshake is awkward / a hug is too.” He makes me remember that there are poems in my blow-dryer, my toilet, my sneakers. The material for poetry is everywhere. Poetic language can be found in the mundane. To bring the mundane into the heightened language of poetry, is perhaps more difficult than to not write another poem about the seemingly universal. I applaud Banias’ range as a poet.
These poems are usually pressed against the left margin, with the lines running long (past the mid-page). Often times, the poems are just one stanza (not usually a monostich). Sometimes the poems will be in couplets or contain multiple stanzas. Seldom do the poems stray from the left margin or meander around the page. This stylistic choice seems suiting (and soothing) for the voice of the poems, a voice with the ability to transverse assumed boundaries and identities.
Anybody
By Ari Banias
W.W. Norton & Company
Hardcover, 9780393247794, 112 pp.
September 2016
-
Ari Banias Unlocks the Truth in ‘Anybody’
Posted on November 2, 2016 by Neyat Yohannes
9780393247794_752eaSometimes you just have take a mirror to your insides and look into it as you unravel your guts and watch your many selves spill out into the earth in rivulets. In his debut poetry collection, Ari Banias settles into a sweet spot between introspection and examining external ephemera. Anybody harnesses a duality that considers one’s identity from the confines of a darkened broom closet whilst simultaneously attempting to make sense of the metaphysical from an arcadian setting.
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. While the pacing and mood change from poem to poem, there’s a playful self-awareness that fastens them all together around an overarching, almost-tangible aura.
Early in the collection, Banias muses over windows. We are introduced to a narrator who’s been gifted—cursed?—with a heightened sense of recognition in the midst of even the most humdrum of activities:
What’s personal is being here with all of you.
You know how you can’t really look out a window without it
being a thing you’re doing,
wistful or just framed in its way by you
Being you and the window being a window? It isn’t casual (18).
At first glance, Banias appears to romanticize the act of staring out a window à la Wes Anderson. But Banias sees the window as more than a prop for a perfectly aligned film shot. This excerpt alludes to the intimacy of our connection to others—inanimate or not—and the accountability we must have over these connections.
In a later passage, Banias returns to the window as an apparatus of self-reflection and further examines the individual’s relationship with others. He approaches the notion that there’s a moral obligation that comes with social interaction:
I saw one kid the other day point a phone
from their window into mine to take a photo of me I wanted to take
one in response as a reminder that hey it’s a window
Not a mirror and the object talks back (18).
Whether it’s in the act of taking photos of strangers—too clouded in the thought process of selecting an Instagram filter to be bothered with asking for permission—or composing mean tweets with total disregard for the party on the receiving end, we’ve devolved into self-serving blobs who often forget to see the humanity in others.
Anybody pays special attention to location. Banias describes urban landscapes with a fanciful quality usually reserved for pastoral poems. However, rather than painting an idyllic portrait of rural life, he takes the grime of city living for what it is and in “DOT DOT DOT” he embraces it with lines like “Touch me lightly as we walk around the polluted lake.” He writes:
smell the eucalyptus reminiscent of cat piss.
Glance with me into the cardboard box at the discarded khakis
and rollerblade suitcase, and touch my shoulder. This is the key
broken off inside my card door in desperation by a stranger (89).
Banias extracts the hazards of urban dwelling and deposits them against the backdrop of a date. In his own tongue-in-cheek way, he seems to poke fun at the pastoral poem as he reworks it to praise the ugly.
Anybody is about the the self and its ever-changing forms. It isn’t necessarily a journey of self-discovery or self-actualization, or even self-realization. It is about recognition. In tribute to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, Banias titles one of the tail-end poems in the collection, “Recognition Is the Misrecognition You Can Bear.” Cruel Optimism is a text that investigates precarity in the context of the public sphere. It carefully considers the consequences of putting a halt to the categorization of identity in order to reorient our sense of self based on the particular objects we’re affected by.
Ari Banias’ Anybody is, in part, a generous response to Berlant’s case study on identity and self-recognition. Moreover, it makes strides of its own in probing the constructs of these aforementioned items. This is a collection that can be read in one existential sitting, but it begs to be reread many times over. Depending on your disposition going into Anybody, a new truth can be unlocked every time you pick it up.
POETRY
Anybody by Ari Banias
W. W. Norton & Company
Published September 20, 2016
ISBN 9780393247794