The author has a talent for weaving myriad, seemingly unrelated observations into a fairly cohesive whole and tying them together with thought provoking final lines. Within these poems are vignettes of economic hardship in his native Greece, existing as an other in a world which doesn’t welcome him, and just getting by in a rather bleak landscape where the biggest threat to your existence might be the cost of living or it might be the person who lives next door.

We are all complicated and bring our baggage along wherever we go, and Ari Banias has deftly acknowledged his while steadfastly not giving up his pursuit of living life on his own terms.