Ari Banias + Margaret Ross

Come see why CAConrad says, “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.” Or why Maggie Nelson gushes, ““I’m so impressed by the range and grace of Ari Banias’ Anybody. It’s discursive, straight-talking, and thinky, then ghostlike, elliptical, and mischievous. It takes its time, then rushes; it’s quiet, then bold; it’s steeped in sociality, then ringing with solitude. I happily recognize its arrival, even if I know (as does Banias, quoting Berlant) that recognition may be but the misrecognition we can bear.”

Margaret Ross’ A Timeshare unearths the corporeal in the most desolate reaches of corporate speech: Futures exchange; Human resources; Personal life. Lush and visceral, A Timeshare knows that questions and crises of individual existence are inextricably bound to shared experience and its deft music carries from the closest closet to outer space, touching the concrete through the metaphysical.

This will be a very special evening of poetry!

Ari Banias has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Offing, Poetry, A Public Space, as part of the exhibition Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects, and in a chapbook, What’s Personal is Being Here With All Of You (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). Ari lives and works in Berkeley. Anybody is his first book.

Margaret Ross‘s first book, A Timeshare, came out last fall. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic and The New Yorker and have been recognized by fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford, where she is currently a Stegner Fellow.