Publisher: W. W. Norton (2018)
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 thisinstead of a that. Witty, tender, and original, these poems pierce the constructs that define our lives.
“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
"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
"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
