In this category:

    FLEURSDUMAL POETRY LIBRARY - classic, modern, experimental & visual & sound poetry, poetry in translation, city poets, poetry archive, pre-raphaelites, editor's choice, etc.
    EDITOR'S CHOICE
    #Editors Choice Archiv
    FICTION & NON-FICTION - books, booklovers, lit. history, biography, essays, translations, short stories, columns, literature: celtic, beat, travesty, war, dada & de stijl, drugs, dead poets
    BOOKS
    BOOKS. The final chapter?
    - Book News
    FICTION & NON-FICTION - books, booklovers, lit. history, biography, essays, translations, short stories, columns, literature: celtic, beat, travesty, war, dada & de stijl, drugs, dead poets
    FICTION & NONFICTION ARCHIVE
    Archive A-B
    FLEURSDUMAL POETRY LIBRARY - classic, modern, experimental & visual & sound poetry, poetry in translation, city poets, poetry archive, pre-raphaelites, editor's choice, etc.
    POETRY ARCHIVE
    Archive A-B

New on FdM

  1. Bluebird by Lesbia Harford
  2. Prix Goncourt du premier roman (2023) pour “L’Âge de détruire” van Pauline Peyrade
  3. W.B. Yeats: ‘Easter 1916’
  4. Paul Bezembinder: Nostalgie
  5. Anne Provoost: Decem. Ongelegenheidsgedichten voor asielverstrekkers
  6. J.H. Leopold: O, als ik dood zal zijn
  7. Paul Bezembinder: Na de dag
  8. ‘Il y a’ poème par Guillaume Apollinaire
  9. Eugene Field: At the Door
  10. J.H. Leopold: Ik ben een zwerver overal

Or see the index

All categories

  1. AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (12)
  2. AUDIO, CINEMA, RADIO & TV (217)
  3. DANCE & PERFORMANCE (60)
  4. DICTIONARY OF IDEAS (202)
  5. EXHIBITION – art, art history, photos, paintings, drawings, sculpture, ready-mades, video, performing arts, collages, gallery, etc. (1,515)
  6. FICTION & NON-FICTION – books, booklovers, lit. history, biography, essays, translations, short stories, columns, literature: celtic, beat, travesty, war, dada & de stijl, drugs, dead poets (3,870)
  7. FLEURSDUMAL POETRY LIBRARY – classic, modern, experimental & visual & sound poetry, poetry in translation, city poets, poetry archive, pre-raphaelites, editor's choice, etc. (4,780)
  8. LITERARY NEWS & EVENTS – art & literature news, in memoriam, festivals, city-poets, writers in Residence (1,616)
  9. MONTAIGNE (110)
  10. MUSEUM OF LOST CONCEPTS – invisible poetry, conceptual writing, spurensicherung (54)
  11. MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY – department of ravens & crows, birds of prey, riding a zebra, spring, summer, autumn, winter (184)
  12. MUSEUM OF PUBLIC PROTEST (144)
  13. MUSIC (222)
  14. NATIVE AMERICAN LIBRARY (4)
  15. PRESS & PUBLISHING (91)
  16. REPRESSION OF WRITERS, JOURNALISTS & ARTISTS (112)
  17. STORY ARCHIVE – olv van de veestraat, reading room, tales for fellow citizens (17)
  18. STREET POETRY (46)
  19. THEATRE (186)
  20. TOMBEAU DE LA JEUNESSE – early death: writers, poets & artists who died young (356)
  21. ULTIMATE LIBRARY – danse macabre, ex libris, grimm & co, fairy tales, art of reading, tales of mystery & imagination, sherlock holmes theatre, erotic poetry, ideal women (229)
  22. WAR & PEACE (127)
  23. WESTERN FICTION & NON-FICTION (22)
  24. · (2)

Or see the index



  1. Subscribe to new material: RSS

Ari Banias: A Symmetry. Poems

Winner of the 2022 Publish Triangle Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Award. Finalist for the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.

A thrilling, discursive second collection from “a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive” (Mark Doty).

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.

From within psychic interiors and iconic sites—the museum, the strip mall, the discotheque, the sea—A Symmetry attends to the intimate, social proportions of our material world and discerns the simmering potential of a present that “can be some other way. And is.”

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Poetry, and the Nation, among other publications. He lives in Oakland, California.

Ari Banias:
A Symmetry
Poems
October 2021
Publishers: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 978-0-393-86813-5
112 pages
Hardcover
$26.95

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

More in: #Editors Choice Archiv, - Book News, Archive A-B, Archive A-B

Previous and Next Entry

« | »

Thank you for reading Fleurs du Mal - magazine for art & literature