I Will Get Up Off Of

By (author): Simina Banu

Overthinking simple actions leads to overwhelming poems about what one can lean on if promised help doesn’t help


I Will Get Up Off Of is a book about trying to leave a chair. How does anyone ever leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved – so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate. What is there to lean on when avenues promising help don’t help? Bell may want to #talk but does it want to listen? I Will Get Up Off Of explores the role art plays in survival and the hope that underlies every creative impulse.

“The voice of these poems moves like a magical fish trapped in a small square bowl, dazzlingly alive inside an almost annihilating constriction. These poems play a serious game in a tight space, caught in the looping limbo between intention — “I will…”, “I will…”, “I will…”— and action. Simina Banu’s skill and humour animate every line and gesture within this inventive drama that begins “(I will get up off of) this monobloc but I’ve been sentenced….” Sentenced to form and to language, Banu gives us a mind thinking its way toward freedom.” – Damian Rogers, author of Dear Leader


AUTHOR

Simina Banu

Simina Banu is a writer interested in interrogating her own experience with technology, consumerism, pop culture and the poetics of (un)translation. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including filling Station, untethered, In/Words Magazine and the Feathertale Review . In 2015, words(on)pages press published her first chapbook, where art. Her second chapbook, Tomorrow, adagio, was published by above/ground press in 2019. POP is her first full length collection of poetry. She lives and writes in Montreal.


Reviews

“ltpgtltigtI Will Get Up Off Ofltigt is an immersive poetic exploration like no other this book folds into itself like a nesting doll of metaphor commentary and overall beef with latestage capitalism The ways in which Banu tackles the subject of depression made me feel seen and want to scream and the tumbling proselike structure amplifies this and other symptoms of capitalist society with eerie veracity Every poem in ltigtI Will Get Up Off Ofltigt launches from the starting point of the title interspersed with interactive moments like QR codes wikipedia scavenger hunts and instagram feeds I have never quite inhaled a poetry collection as fast as I did this one ltbgtWroxanna Work ltigtLiterati BookstoreltigtltbgtltpgtltpgtI will get up off of excels at establishing a gag only to surgically deliver the punchline later in the book The book loops and returns back maybe not even returning back because the speaker seems stuck on the monobloc Each poem an attempt to get off of the monobloc ltbgtJonathan Miller ltigtEarShrubltigtltbgtltpgtltpgtThere is something compelling in how Banu rhythmically returns each lyric opening to this monobloc offering book title as the presumed opening phrase of each poem perpetually returning to the beginning to begin again offering a tethered and unsettlingly stressed variation on Robert Kroetschs structure of composing the long poem by continually returning to the beginning one can keep going indefinitely after all ltbgtrob mclennans blogltbgtltbrgtltbrgtltbrgtltpgt”

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Details

Dimensions:

72 Pages
8.0in * 5.0in * 0.25in
0.25lb

Published:

May 21, 2024

Publisher:

Coach House Books

ISBN:

9781552454817

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Women Authors

Language:

eng

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Other books by Simina Banu

POP

By (author): Simina Banu