Eavan Boland with Ari Banias

Celebrating the release of two new books of poetry

A Poet's Dublin - by Eavan Boland

Anybody: Poems - by Ari Banias

both published by W.W. Norton

A rare evening of reading and discussion betweem teacher and student.

about A Poet's Dublin:

Written over years, the transcendent and moving poems in A Poet's Dublin seek out shadows and impressions of a powerful, historic city, studying how it forms and alters language, memory, and selfhood. The poems range from an evocation of the neighborhoods under the hills where the poet lived and raised her children to the inner-city bombing of 1974, and include such signature poems as "The Pomegranate," “The War Horse,” and “Anna Liffey.” Above all, these poems weave together the story of a self and a city—private, political, and bound by history. The poems are supported by photographs of the city at all times and in all seasons: from dawn on the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, to twilight up in the Dublin foothills.

Praise for the work of Eavan Boland:

“For Boland, one feels poetry has to be honorable and natural, though at times as terrifying as giving birth alone in the open meadow, and that it is also made of blood and the guilt of being human.” — Yusef Komunyakaa

about Anybody:Poems:

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

Praise for the work of Ari Banias:

“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.” — Maggie Nelson

“Born late in the twentieth century, tutored under the twin suns of Frank O’Hara and Guillaume Apollinaire, vexed by 'this set of meanings on my body,’ Ari Banias is a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive, a citizen of the possible. How many utopias? (keep imagining them).” — Mark Doty

“Here is Anybody with its syntax of rupture and suture, its restless questions and metaphysical balloons. What a thrilling, original, generous, openhearted book. A book we have waited for, whoever we are.” — Donna Masini

“Ari Banias has written one of the finest first books (OK, any book!) that I’ve ever read… These poems stake a claim on the future: they give us a poet who understands to the bone how syntax and line and music embody emotion, and how the integrity of the spirit is the maker’s integrity.” — Tom Sleigh


Eavan Boland is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction. A professor and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University, she is the winner of a Lannan Foundation Award. She lives in Stanford, California, and Dublin, Ireland.

Ari Banias has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University, where he was most recently a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He received an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and lives in Berkeley, California.