“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
In
, Ari Banias takes up questions of recognition and belonging: how boundaries are drawn and managed, the ways
he
and
she
,
us
them
here
elsewhere
are kept separate, and at what cost identities and selves are forged. Moving through iconic and imagined landscapes,
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.