Ari Banias — A Symmetry: A Contemporary Poetry Collection

Description

W. W. Norton, hardcover

Publication Date: October 12, 2021

Publisher Marketing: A thrilling, discursive second collection from “a poet for this hour–bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive” (Mark Doty)

Unsettling the myth of an ordered reality through uncanny repetitions and elliptical inquiry, A Symmetry considers the inscriptions of nationhood, language, and ancestral memory. A window washer wields an impossibly long mop in the mirrored pane of a Greek government building; strangers mesmerize us while they fold sheets into perfect corners. “Artists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they ‘leave politics out of it.'”

In meditative wanderings and compressed, enigmatic lyrics, Ari Banias probes the sometimes-touching, often-violent mundane to draw out the intimate, social proportions of our material world.

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