Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

Ari Banias’s work takes place in the rich, artful between-space. In the first poem of his newest book, A Symmetry (W.W. Norton, 2021) he writes: “Some men are women too/the way a mountain is land and a harbor is land and a parking lot/Refuse the difference between sameness and difference.” A fresh injection of mutability in a rigid world, his poems capture stills from the unending motion of meaning-making. As writer Gregg Bordowitz says, “Ari Banias attunes to unacquainted frequencies with great precision…alternating between brutal excesses and incalculable joys. Every line holds. Reading this book is like feeling gravity.”

In addition to A Symmetry, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, Ari is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2018). His work has been featured in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, American Poetry Review, and Triple Canopy, among others.

Banias’s reading will be followed by a conversation with Art Middleton. Books will be sold by Broadside Books before the event and a signing will follow the reading.