Ari Banias: A Symmetry
@ Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago
915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Thursday, February 8th, at 5PM
Ari Banias discusses A Symmetry. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
Presented in partnership with The Program in Creative Writing
At the Logan Center for the Arts, Room 801.
About the Book: The poems in Ari Banias’s thrilling and discursive second collection, 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 poem’s 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, “artists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they “leave politics out of it.'” Climate collapse and debt accelerate, and desire transforms itself in the ruins.
About the Author: Ari Banias is the author of A Symmetry, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, and Anybody, both from W. W. Norton. His work has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies, and has been published in American Poetry Review, Triple Canopy, The Nation, Georgia Review, The New Republic, Hyperallergic, The Yale Review, and Bæst, among others.
Event Location:
Logan Center
915 E. 60th Street Room 801
Chicago, IL 60637
Official Website
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Tags: A Symmetry, Ari Banias, Ari Banias: A Symmetry, Chicago, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Seminary Co Op Bookstore, Washington Park
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