Anybody: poems

Description

""One of the most exciting new voices I've read in American poetry."--Eavan Boland. 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"-- Some kind of we -- At any given moment -- Narrative -- Wilder, -- On pockets -- Giant snowballs -- Who you're about to be -- Grandchild -- An arrow -- Solve for x -- Close -- One possible reading among many -- Villagers -- Morphology -- Double mastectomy -- The flattened grass that holds your shape -- The men -- Being with you makes me think about -- Exquisite corpse -- The feeling -- Prairie restoration project -- To the god of sobriety -- Handshake -- A sunset -- Your wild domesticated inner life -- Where we sit watching -- Wedding -- Enough -- Who is ghost -- A version -- Aren't we -- Gay bars -- Hog -- Bouquet -- Find love in Brooklyn now! -- The hole -- Still here -- Authentic city -- Volley -- Horizontal -- Recognition is the misrecognition you can bear -- Various attentions all landing like birds into the same tree and thrilling there some minutes at dusk -- Dot dot dot -- No more birds.