12 or 20 (second series) questions with Misha Solomon

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has twice appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and in journals across Canada. He is a student in Concordia's Interdisciplinary PhD program. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, appears with Brick Books in March 2026, and his third chapbook, Misha Solomon's Biodôme: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster, follows with above/ground press in April 2026.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020), made me feel like I was actually a poet. It changed my life in that it opened up the possibility of pursuing poetry in a real and public way. My upcoming first full-length book, My Great-Grandfather Dance Ballet (Brick Books, 2026), feels different from FLORALS in that it has a strong central concept/narrative. But it also feels like a natural extension of some of the things I’ve been exploring since before FLORALS came out, a sort of closing of this first long chapter of my poetic “journey.”

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I happened to take a Quebec Writers’ Federation poetry workshop taught by Derek Webster and just liked it. I had been taking QWF prose workshops for a few years, just as a hobby, but it wasn’t until the poetry workshop that I found something I felt like I could really do. The contained, brief nature of a poem (or at least of the poems I wrote back then) was appealing to me. They were things both with and without rules, and I like applying structure to creativity and creativity to structure.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I’m not sure how long it takes me to start a project. Sometimes projects starts before I know they’ve started. My writing comes quickly and first drafts are reasonably close to final drafts, for me. I edit, of course, but I write quickly and when I write a poem I write to completion. I think my poems can sometimes trick me into thinking they’re done because I am good at having a beginning, middle, and end all figured it out, so that’s why I like to write in some sort of community to get early feedback.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Often poems begin with a prompt of some kind, maybe one I’ve been given or one I’ve given myself. Sometimes they come out of just an idea, a feeling, a thesis, but that’s usually once I already have a project on the go. In the past I’ve been an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, but these days I’m more focused on working on a “book” right away.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings are an essential part of my creative process. I love them. I would do them all the time. They are my favourite part of being a poet. I write to an audience.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Yes! Or at least I hope so! In My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, I think my editor, Leah Horlick, really nailed the questions I was asking in the back cover copy she kindly wrote for the book: "What if the queer ancestor you always wondered about had really existed—and could speak to you across all time? When there’s only one document to be found in the archive, can our misheard or half-remembered family stories be enough?” In my new work, I’m focused on questions of (non-)reproduction, of what it means to be an animal, of what it means to be a human with an animal in your house.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writers certainly have a role. Different writers have different roles. I think, at my core, I see myself as an entertainer? That sounds vaudevillian, song-and-dance-y, but what I mean is that I want my writing (or my performances of my writing) to provide distraction and engagement. I want people to enjoy my writing, even if I also want my writing to shift a political consciousness or evoke negative emotions.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I love working with an outside editor. I had an incredible experience working with Leah Horlick on this book. I don’t find it difficult. I really enjoy seeing how my work is landing for someone else. In my non-poetic employment, I give notes to screenwriters, so I’ve very used to the process, and it’s fun to be on the other side of it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

What does it say about me that I cannot for the life of me think of an answer to this question?

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I haven’t really moved between genres in a public-facing way yet. My current project involves a lot more prose and lyric essay and academic writing, and the shift has been fluid. It has felt like the right time, especially since so much of my poetry is prose-y already. The appeal for me is the ability to dig further into ideas in a single work. There’s also the appeal of the potential of a wider audience, since readers are for some reason more “comfortable” with prose than with poetry.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I do not have a writing routine of any kind. A typical day begins with my fiancé, Guillaume, and my dog, Mugcake.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Frank O’Hara. And Mugcake.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Of my current home? Mugcake. A mostly pleasing doggy odour.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’m influenced by science. My BA is in biological anthropology, and I grew up wanting to be a zoologist. My current work is interdisciplinary and heavily influenced by thinking about primates, biological reproduction, animal studies, etc. In My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, I was influenced by ballet, which isn’t something I knew (or know) very much about, but I’ve always been interested in it and loved being able to research it and write about it. There are also a few ekphrastic poems about the art in my home, so I suppose I am influenced by visual art on occasion.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Oh wow. So many! I am fortunate to have many writer friends. Allegra Kaplan, a fantastic Victoria-based poet and friend, recently said something about how so much of my poetics is about community, which I thought was a very nice way of putting it. Sarah Burgoyne, my poetry fairy godmother, has been a fundamental source of inspiration, support, encouragement, and friendship. Stephanie Bolster, my MA and PhD thesis supervisor, whose work (especially her zoo-related work) has been an inspiration (stay tuned for a new above/ground press chapbook…). My generative writing group (currently mostly on pause), with André Babyn, Sasha Manoli, and (previously) Lauren Peat. My current writing/workshop group in Montreal, with Robin Durnford, Madelaine Caritas Longman, Domenica Martinello, Melanie Power, Sarah Wolfson (we miss you, Patrick O’Reilly and Carlos Pittella!). Other poetry mentors/teachers I’ve had over the years, including Liz Howard, Sina Queyras, Lisa Richter, and Danez Smith. I could go on and on, truly. And I haven’t even gotten to poetic inspirations like Frank O’Hara.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

There are lots of things I haven’t done that I’d like to do, but I feel like I can’t quite put them into words. That’s not true — I just don’t want to put them into words, for fear of their not happening.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I hadn’t been a writer, I would have surely continued working full-time in scripted television development, which I still do as a freelancer. But going back to my childhood dream of zoology would be fun. Hosting an animal-centric documentary series. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I wanted to express myself artistically and publicly in some way, and this is the way I enjoy most and am best at.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I just finished Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told by Jeremy Atherton Lin and found it fascinating and moving. I also loved his previous book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. I also just mostly completed by annual year-end film catch-up — I think The Secret Agent may be my favourite film from 2025.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on my spring above/ground press chapbook. Kinda sorta putting together a second full-length collection while working on my PhD project.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three, : Mahaila Smith + Janice Colman,

Further to what I picked up at the most recent edition of the ottawa small press book fair [see my first post on such here; see my second post on such here]. What might 2026 bring for all of this small press fair goodness, possibly? And, as ever, check out Bywords.ca for all of your Ottawa literary events listings, as well as an array of new poems posted monthly.

Ottawa ON: Produced as part of Smith’s 2024 John Newlove Poetry Award win (as judged by Toronto poet, editor and publisher Jim Johnstone) is Ottawa poet Mahaila Smith’s latest, the chapbook After All This Hurt (Bywords, 2025). After All This Hurt follows their recent “novelette in verse” Seed Beetle (Stelliform, 2025) [see my review of such here] and a handful of chapbooks, including one from above/ground. Across sixteen poems, only one of which sits even slightly beyond a single page, Smith’s narratives suggest a straightforward patter, but offer narrative twist and turn, hard left and right. Each poem offers a descriptive clarity, unfolding scenes, and a meditative push, seeking answers to impossible questions, perhaps, or to find that pinpoint of what otherwise might seem out of reach. “My things, undisturbed,” closes the poem “After all this wandering,” “stuck in the dirt / under my hoard of leaves and feathers.” Smith attempts to write their way through and beyond “all this hurt,” as a way to understand what it means. To understand how best to set down, move beyond.

Time to leave 

I collect the objects I think I will need,
as swiftly as I can.
Socks and matches,
thick clothing and a waterproof coat,
gloves and dried food.
I hold my breath,
passing from bedroom to pantry.
I will not breathe the spores
of recent infection, scattered
from shared ventilation
entwining the entire building.
I get out quickly.
Hoping I’ve done enough.

Grant Wilkins and James Spyker

Toronto ON/Montreal QC: I hadn’t been aware of the work of “Montreal-born, emerging Toronto poet” Janice Colman, author of the chapbook PLAYING CELLO FOR A DEAD BIRD (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025), a chapbook that suggests itself, despite whatever journal publishing credits within, as Colman’s debut. While I do find the type a bit small in this title, Colman’s poems are intriguing for the slow movement of her accumulated phrase-lines, one set against another in a kind of purposeful meandering. “I need to buy more milk,” the poem “I want to write a poem about heartache” begins, “we’re running / low    I want to write a poem about / running & low // to the ground.” There’s such lovely pacing through her poems, such vibrant ease in her lines and her line-breaks. Oh, I would be interested to see where her poems might next go.

what is another word for bird?

warbler through my left hip into
groin right beside sharp 

on my feet my grandmother’s bunions
veer to the right beside
index leaning left    what 

another word for low-lying
fragments bruised fruits that fall
my daughter on the same floor
a few doors down 

there are no walls
only words spoken
through a hornet’s nest

 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two, : Jean-Sébastien Grenier, Colin Quin + Cora Siré,

[Manahil Bandukwala, sitting the Brick Books table] 

Further to what I picked up at the most recent edition of the ottawa small press book fair [see my first post on such here], an event now thirty-one years old. What the what? And you’ve been catching my posts from the recent Toronto fairs, yes? [see my fourth post on such here]; and did you see that Vancouver poet Jane Shi is starting a site for reviews as well?

Ottawa ON: Curious to see emerging poets Jean-Sébastien Grenier [see his six questions interview here] and Colin Quin [see his six questions interview here] self-publishing small chapbooks, presumably aimed for release at our small press fair. From Grenier, comes the chapbook BLOODORANGES, A DOZEN (2025), a title released in a “limited printing” of thirty copies; from Quin, it is the small chapbook Death Jester (2025), produced sans date, colophon or author biography. Both titles hold a table of contents at the offset, which I always consider unrequired for small publications such as these. I mean, if you’re dealing with twenty pages or less, roundabout, one should be able to find everything rather quickly.

Quin’s poems in Death Jester revel in the short sequence, in the gestural response, writing first-person meditations and expositions. “So, I tested the priest’s confessional creed / I’m rehearsing the book of subliminal verses / until it becomes second nature.” he writes, to open the poem “The Bent Knee.” “I imagined disobeying god / and caught my tongue playing with a razorblade / like it was a lollipop. // That’s the shadow-law of god.” Quin’s lyric offers a youthful vibrancy still seeking itself out, feeling out language and thinking, working out a series of gestures and response via the lyric. “Oh Death!” the fifth poem of his similarly-titled sequence, utilized as repeated prompt, begins, “You chain-smoke men like cigarettes.”

While working similar elements of exploratory, the pieces in Grenier’s BLOODORANGES, A DOZEN are a bit more meditative, darker; less shaped by line-breaks and visual space than in Quin’s chapbook, although offering curious elements of pause, of lyric stretch of phrase. With elements of occasional antiquated language, both titles provide important first steps towards the work that hopefully they both might get to, attempting to best determine how and what they write; further absorbing influence to find their own individual ways through and into themselves.

Before the Metamorphosis, Hearken 

If lost, blinded through a worm-lit foliage,
Licked by whispers burrowing in your ears,
Do not be petrified by what you may hear
In their saliva-shrewd chaos language.
Keep steady through the chattering mosaic.
And hold firm through the fires of fear. 

In this strange forest, let your fear crystallize
As a kaleidoscopic music box of knowledge. 

Listen. When your pirouette slows again,
and the forest’s a gorgon’s hissing wig,
Behold, the maddened carnival jester
Raising a jack-o’-lantern of laughter! 

A figure illuminating the flicker of your smirk
As you struggle to recall the crescendo of its worth.

Montreal QC: The latest from Montreal writer Cora Siré is the chapbook Moonlight Recipe for Disaster (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025), following a handful of poetry, fiction and hybrid/memoir titles, including Fear the Mirror: Stories (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2021). Moonlight Recipe for Disaster is composed as a first-person lyric sequence in seventeen numbered sections, reminiscent slightly of a prior recent Turret House Press title, Montreal writer Claire Sherwood’s chapbook-length sequence, Eat your words (2024) [see my review of such here]. So perhaps get your food-related lyric sequences off to James Hawes during their next open reading period, everyone.

1. Pick a knife with a red handle.

 

To avoid a massacre, make sure the knife’s not too sharp. Also, not too blunt.

Time can be lost with futile sawing, and there’s the risk of repetitive motion injury. 

Sharp is to blunt as poetry is to memoir. It’s a matter of the knife’s edge, the blade where imagination cuts into memory.

I’m prone to self-harm either way. 

Especially tonight when my creativity’s stalled and the moon is holding her breath.

Siré’s sequence curls and whirls through a meditation around elements of the work and life of Ottawa-born writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) [catch the piece I wrote on Smart for Geist a while back here], specifically her infamous 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, swirling lyric threads across a tightly-woven lyric. Her poem offers the structure of a sequence of recipe steps and general cooking advice, weaving elements of Smart’s example and ethic, amid far broader, and more specific, meditation and life advice. I’m intrigued by the way she builds her sequence of prose lyrics, and would hope that this lands in a full-length collection at some point, although there’s a part of me that would want to see this piece expanded, furthered. I feel as though the potential of this piece might be far more, somehow, through Siré’s sharp eye. Perhaps I need to be paying more attention to the work of Cora Siré.

4. Onion, onion, Zwiebel and cebolla, viciously chopped.

Cry, cry, cry to the count of three, a waltz that evokes a writer. I haven’t thought of Elizabeth Smart in a long, long time. There’s no ratatouille in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It’s all fierce passion. Not a single banal chopping action to be found in the novel.

James Spyker's table of handmade items,

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one, : Tamsyn Farr, emily shafer + Yoko’s Dogs,

[Michael e. Casteels, Puddles of Sky Press]

Another small press fair, come and gone; and have you been catching my posts from the recent participation in both the TIFA Small Press Market and Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market? [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here; see my fourth post here].

Wakefield/La Pêche QC: The latest from Pearl Pirie’s phafours is Crime & Ornament: poems (2025) by Tamsyn Farr [see her “six questions” interview from last year this time], a chapbook debut by the self-described “degenerate, straggler, marauder, buffoon, confidence trickster, latent criminal, pathological phenomenon, and poet who goes around Wakefield, Quebec, in velvet hose with gold braid like a fairground monkey.” I had a landlord back in the late 1990s who was the “Village poet” of Wakefield, I wonder if she knows Phil Cohen? “America was Kmart the Beautiful / when I was seven and in love / with Teddy Ruxpin.” she writes, to open the first poem “Cross Border Shopping,” a poem around memory, composed beneath the shadow of the current political climate. Her poems in this short collection offer depiction, response and memory, writing first-person poem-thoughts across narrative stretches, playful patter and sharp turns. Or, as the first quarter of the poem “Lovin It” reads: “Piercing gun cocked: pop goes / the sheen of a flat world // conspicuous, daubed / in all-angled light. // A footnote in the fiscal year / liquidates the wax museum // in some sun’s hollow centre. / Now two-thumbed hands // shake at rates reflecting / the cadences of the real world. // The death rattles’ goo goo / ga ga: the last dead giveaway.” I am intrigued by her use of political and cultural touchstones, riffing references and exploring multiple shapes and forms across this assemblage. I am curious to see what might come next, certainly.

Ornaments Wanted: Dead or Alive

On the mantle, a BBQ lighter. It came in a pack
of two: red and blue. Its long, flame-tipped finger
lights the fireplace. Left too close, it later catches
fire and explodes and leaves specks of soot over 

the whole goddamn house because that’s how hot
fire gets, hot enough to blow up the fire-maker
and ash-festoon every surface. And at the blue
fire’s centre is six months or years of sad and
unfiligreed time: to hose you down and feed you
peanuts, to talk to your druid therapist, to recall
that hangover nap on the toilet in a bathroom for
employees of the research unit of the psych
hospital, to be gainfully employed, to step into
the cold shower like a chest-beating Swede and
fantasize pleasantly about being fed into a wood
chipper. Mulch-me becomes the beadwork on
another disenchanted century. 

He wasn’t wrong to look for the ornament
embedded in the object. He wasn’t wrong that
fads lead to landfills adorned with dated kitchen
cabinetry. Every Hummel figurine is haunted.
Snipped from their forests, my indoor trees
yellow around me. 

(For the love of Christ, go water your plants).

Cobourg ON/New York NY: From Stuart Ross’ infamous Proper Tales Press comes New York City-based Rochester, New York poet emily shafer’s chapbook debut, it’s too early for poetry (2025). There’s a clarity to her lyric I find charming, a straightforwardness that still bends in the light, offering a slight pull on the line from gravity. Her poems really do feel akin to full-length sentence-thoughts, stretched across a canvas to shape across pause, interruptions, turns and twists. “Midnight ivy holds this house / together but I squeeze / out through the cracks,” she writes, as part of “the Munchmuseet,” “If you didn’t want to blossom, you should have told me so [.]”

August 

Jessica works at the Met
every day editing
exhibition photographs, so we go
out on weekends to some bar
in the Bronx for wings and syrup
-y soda. I can’t yet tell
if the waiter has had such
picky customers before, tearing
apart and rearranging the menu, but he seems
to mind
            only us.
At midnight I see the moon
over Van Courtland Park out the empty
train car window and she says
it looks like me and I rest
my head on her shoulder
            as the I train takes us home.

Montreal QC: I’ve long found collaborative quartet Yoko’s Dogs [Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro] a curious aberration, offering an ongoing conversation between a larger grouping of collaborators than the usual two or three, paired with the fact that they’re all individually well-established and published writers, and the fact of their sheer ongoingness, perhaps comparable only with their contemporary, Pain Not Bread [made up of the collaborative trio Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton]. Yoko’s Dogs formed in Montreal in 2006, and has since published titles including the full-length Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013), and chapbooks Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Caution Tape (Collusion Books, 2021). Their latest is the chapbook Lunchbox Poems (Turret House Press, 2025), a title composed as an extended sequence of short, fragmented and accumulative lyric bursts. “can you put your feet up and relax,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “if the footstool is an anteater [.]” Their declared intention sits within the structure of the English-language haiku, but their lyric feels a bit more expansive than that, pulling at the boundaries of where the lyric meets a clipped, meditative density. Not straight haiku at all (again, in the adapted and otherwise imperfectly-translated English-language parlance of an original Japanese form), but something expansive, and ongoing. Not simply one small moment held, but held in a loose kind of sequence.

on the phone with my mother
I pull skin from
a slice of salami 

full snow moon, your other name is
hunger

Ongoing notes: mid-September, 2025: Claudia Coutu Radmore + Kim and Léa Roger Abi Zeid Daou,

September, once more. Keep in mind: The Factory Reading Series later this month, featuring Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly, who is coming up from Texas, Michael Lithgow (who recently returned to Ottawa from half a decade in Edmonton) and Ottawa poet Ben Ladouceur (launching his new above/ground press chapbook). There are probably other updates to keep track of as well, but it can be hard to recall everything. I say: check out www.bywords.ca

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: There are moments going through Ottawa poet Claudia Coutu Radmore’s work that I’m occasionally surprised by, whether the chapbook I produced through above/ground press, or this latest title, someone is lying (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025); moments I’m surprised her work isn’t better known than it is. Over the years, she’s had chapbooks I’ve heard of through multiple presses, from Alfred Gustav Press to Apt. 9 Press to Shoreline Press to Aeolus House Press to Catkin Press (and even garnered a bpNichol Chapbook Award), but full-length collections I rarely hear of, as though she’s finding presses that are underselling the quality of her work. someone is lying is a collection of poem-blocks, each piece set as single stanza prose poems. Her poems offer a propulsion, one with precise angles and a delightful attention to sound and collision. Listen to the opening of the poem “raw vocabulary and water,” for example, that jangles across the lyric: “from a place beyond thought / where language originates in / where it resides procedure takes / us halfway there after that w / need raw something feels each / thought crumbles falls to pieces […]” Going through this work reminds me of Amanda Earl, another Ottawa poet doing stellar work, under the radar for long enough that it begins to frustrate, wondering what certain editors might be thinking. A smart editor at a small press, I should think, should be putting some of these chapbooks together into a full-length collection.

CO: I’ve been moving through siblings Kim and Léa Roger Abi Zeid Daou’s collaboration, The Taste of Sun (Ethel Zine, 2025). Both are PhD candidates and extensive creatives, with Kim also the author of the chapbook You are Memory, and I Archive (Cactus Press, 2023). The Taste of Sun is a collection of four pieces of short prose with an epilogue. “My dad tells me to always remember the big picture—the point—while also adding my special touch.” opens the title piece. “This story is the perfect example of a flashbulb memory, which I learned about in an Introduction to Cognition class.” This is a book about family, about fathers; a heartfelt exploration and declaration of love and admiration. “My dad was always ahead of time. He felt in his heart,” continues the title piece, “what is right, equitable, and just, long before the culture catches up. He taught me love is beyond time.” These first-person pieces are curious in their approach to form, a blend of postcard fiction and first-person postcard memoir pieces. As well, I would be curious as to what the original prompt for such a project was, and if the two of them have been working on further of these. I could see a full-length collection of these, certainly.

Epilogue

On our walk

Dad hands me a daisy.

He holds my hand.

And closes his eyes.

In his warm palm

I feel close to my heart.

I asked what he thought,

As he looks at the blue of the sky.

He says thank you thank you thank you.