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
"I Will Get Up Off Of creates impact with everyday language and twenty first-century imagery of mental illness and wellness. Through this, Banu makes accessible and communal a form (poetry) and topic (depression) that are frequently inaccessible and isolating." – Erin Della Mattia, Room Magazine
"With acerbic wit, I Will Get Up Off Of breaks away from typical refections on suffering. Instead of outright satirizing mental illness or professing cynicism about healing, Banu believes that art can capture hope: 'If even one art molecule / can find the secret stash / it might let loose / the rest.'"– Caroline Noël, Bookworm
"I Will Get Up Off Of is like if you asked a depressed person to describe what being depressed was like, and instead, they invited you into their head and body." – Cecilia Montemayor, The Woodlot
"I Will Get Up Off Of is an immersive poetic exploration like no other; this book folds into itself like a nesting doll of metaphor, commentary and overall beef with late-stage capitalism. The ways in which Banu tackles the subject of depression made me feel seen and want to scream, and the tumbling prose-like structure amplifies this and other symptoms of capitalist society with eerie veracity. Every 'poem' in I Will Get Up Off Of 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." – Wroxanna Work, Literati Bookstore
"I 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." – Jonathan Miller, EarShrub
"There 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 Kroetsch's structure of composing the long poem; by continually returning to the beginning, one can keep going indefinitely, after all." – rob mclennan's blog
