Misha Solomon, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet

 

            Do you remember the Phantom of the Opera original cast recording? That white mask, that red rose? Of course you do, you were probably gay once too. The “Overture”—that’s what this is, get it? I’m setting the scene. I used to listen on cassette. My mother took me to see the production in Toronto—her friend worked with a theatre producer who later went to prison for fraud and so we got great seats, right under where the chandelier swings cinematically. I want you to be hearing a pipe organ. I want you to be waiting for a chandelier to fall.

I am very pleased to see the smart, self-aware and delightfully-playful full-length debut by Montreal poet Misha Solomon, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2026). Following the chapbooks FLORALS (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2022), My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet utilizes as its central prompt the real fact of the author’s great-grandfather having danced ballet, and jumping from there to an expansive and even explosive exploration on Jewish identity, possibility, history and queer desire. “In a hotel room in Burlington, Vermont,” the poem “The Limits of Fiction” begins, “I try to get my grandfather to tell me if his parents ever told him stories about the old country, but he just wants to tell me about Lill St. Cyr at the Gayety.” As the back cover offers, the collection “is a daring, erotic, and humorous exploration of queer longing and Jewish possibility at the turn of two centuries. In a captivating series of narrative poems, Misha Solomon entwines an alternate memoir of his great-grandfather in pre-Holocaust Romania with a contemporary gay life in Montreal.” The poems unfold around the central core of that lifted fact, swirling a structure that might hold elements of narrative scaffolding and narrative building tools, but also elements of sound, repetition, visual gesture and playful chant into something far larger than anything pure narrative could ever provide. “the man man man man man men men / men men men men” he writes, as part of “OVERTURE,” a stretch of repetitions that flow into “men men men men were / in love, are in love, I move them across a / stage and their love seems so true I / convince myself for a moment that I really / do exist [.]” Earlier, in the same poem-section, writing:

a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
a man a man a man a man a man a man
came here and they changed his name

The collection isn’t structured into sections per se, but there are poems highlit in the table of contents that suggest themselves the openings of new groupings, new directions, across Solomon’s book-length suite: “OVERTURE,” “THIS ISN’T A GAY POEM.,” “THIS IS A POLITICAL POEM.” and “THIS IS A CULTURALLY JEWISH POEM.” As opposed to offering distinct, separated sections, Solomon composes a book-length suite with an ebb and flow, a rhythm across the book as a whole. “I was supposed to be the mayor at minimum and now my daily / achievement is holding off on jerking off until I can write an / erotic poem about my great-grandfather,” begins the poem “Belongings III,” “or some made-up / version of him, writing this poem instead of that one, even, / because googling ‘1940s name for male sex worker’ felt a / little too close to ‘old-fashioned word for semen,’ the search / that was on my screen when Guillaume walked into our home / office the other day […].” The poems accumulate together into something large, built purposefully from a series of disparate and different parts, all circling that central core as a kind of mosaic or narrative collage.

Certainly, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet follows a trajectory of other recent full-length poetry debuts through Brick Books that play off and through family archive, offering book-length explorations through new and unusual structures, and allowing the shapes of the poems to provide startlingly fresh perspectives on the otherwise-familiar complications of family, cultural collisions and the disappearance of stories. I’m specifically thinking of titles such as Montreal poet, editor and translator Darby Minott Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself (2021) [see my review of such here], Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Nova Scotia poet Nanci Lee’s Hsin (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], although Solomon’s My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet offers the added layer of fictionalizing elements of family story, for the sake of doing something simultaneously more specific and far more expansive. “You asked why I liked / you,” the poem “To my colleague Ernest, for his eyes only, in response to his confidential queries, 1934,” “or in fact you asked why I was wasting my time with / you, and when I rolled my eyes, you rephrased, but the reason / I didn’t answer isn’t because I don’t know the reasons. I know / the reasons. I like you with all of my senses.” Solomon offers a heart and a lyric that flows, naturally, carefully, delicate and precise, writing family elements as an entry point to a larger exploration on Jewish and queer themes between the past and the present, and all the glorious complications, lovely patter and potential dangers that surround. Or, as the poem “Yoo-Hoo” writes:

Yoo-hoo, do you see me, do you see me over here? I wore this tomato-red shirt so you could see me, yoo-hoo, you with the well-dressed baby, you look like you know nice shirts, yoo-hoo, do you want to tell me you like my shirt?

Over there, you over there, yoo-hoo, do you want to ask me what I’m working on? I just bought this new notebook to write one poem per day, but, yoo-hoo, I’ve only written the date and my name and now I’m staring thoughtfully past you hoping you’ll think I’m actually staring at you and you could say “yoo-hoo, why are you staring at me” and I’d say “how embarrassing, yoo-hoo, I’m actually staring past you, thoughtfully, thinking thoughts, by the way, do you have the time, I didn’t bring my phone, I’m trying to be more present?”

Yoo-hoo, do you have the time? Yoo-hoo, do you want to know why I need the time? I don’t look like someone who needs to yoo-hoo for the time, isn’t that intriguing?

Yoo-hoo, do you want to know?