My
Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet,
Misha Solomon
Brick
Books, 2026
How is it 5 years since Misha did a weekly email list of Some Gay Poems? Do you remember, “they hanged Haman and the cookies are delicious” which ran in part,
"this week I made Hamantaschen
with
a homemade apricot filling
I’ve never made
them before but it seems
as
good a time as any to celebrate survival
[…]
Hamantaschen are cookies named for Haman, a vizier in the Persian empire who sought to kill all the Jews, but was thwarted because King Ahasuerus really loved his wife Esther, who revealed herself to be Jewish
this week I watched a TV show about gay
men
dying
in a different time of a different ongoing pandemic
but
there aren’t commemorative cookies
for
that near-extinction event […]”
There’s an irreverence and engagement bubbling that refuses to be confined in stodgy inert boxes. His writing zags unexpectedly but not erratically as the poems travel and spiral overlapping but new paths.
I looked forward to Mondays for a while, with that going. It was a aCovid project with lively, quirky meditations of shut-in life. “Medieval Sleep” when we typically did two units of sleep each night,
“we modern folk have
lost
so much. We never share
a
mid-sleep mead with those
we
love and our phones are
always
low on charge.”
(He ran it at least 22 weeks according to emails I kept.)
Misha is coming to VERSeFest Thursday March 26. https://www.verseottawa.ca/en/performer/mishasolomon
One of his poems from his book was already scooped up into The Best Canadian Poetry 2025 (“Yoo-Hoo”. p 130 of BCP). It’s casual and yet somehow simultaneously... slaying? How? What did he do there. He’s very good at counterbalancing tones. Technique and heart.
I sit here waiting for My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet by Misha Solomon (Brick, 2026) to drop on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m crious because of how his mind works, what he’ll do in new poems and because he’s looking at family history that has scant records, being in much the same position that i’m in doing my poems of family history. .
It’s like proof of principal of what Derek Beaulieu said in Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the Twenty-first Century (Assembly Press, 2026). Give your work away and people will have access and want to buy it. It doesn’t prevent commercial sales to share.
[It’s here. Eeee.]
So far, me likey.
A piece of documentation of his great-grandfather’s life. The erasure poem included of his own grant application for the project is delightfully meta. Some like Sacha Archer or Puddles of Sky might make. Seems I like poetry both concrete and conceptual. When there are stories there’s a travel, an associative semantic drift I admire, as the poems I quoted above.
He isn’t afraid of the earnest (“we both know that you can wear us like a shawl, take us off when you feel too warm” p. 41), nor of the absurd or silly (“a fun hame for a gnat//would be to catch smoke in /a tiny net” p. 33). It’s all game. It’s all good.
The characteristics of slide and play, insight and humour, casual tone and grounding in details of domestic gay life that I mentioned earlier, all apply to this book too. An engaging read.
The only thing I’m not sure about is the typefaces. Choices were made. The historical threads are in a seriffed typeface, Benton Modern Display. It is hard to read on screen (maybe better on paper) with its high variability of strokes between stem and bowl and bar, and large line spacing. Maybe it works to slow down reading as the writing is more pragmatic and cautious. It doesn’t need to be flagged that way. The contemporary text in non-serifed Calluna Sans font is easy to read. (I seem to have trouble with visual reading needing brighter light and enlarged text to be comfortable these days.)
(Ah, spoke too soon. The pattern breaks. The font assigned to each speaker switches place.)
That
there is these two streams is a fabulous juxtaposition. The covert queer life
of a century ago, longing, lowdown vs the cultural icon “Queen in up at
straight events[…]Be the faggot they want you to be” (p. 47). It feels like a
novel in the sense of English use marked in every sense made by two distinct
characters.
You ever read a book you’re enjoying then, turn aghast, want to close the book in hide it because otherwise you’ll read it all too fast and be done? Yeah, that.
Maybe I can delay gratification or reading overload by making the chocolate mug cake he shares as poem as instructions. It’s quite different than my lava cake go-to.
Maybe I should leave off the review and leave it to you to discover.
I don’t. I can’t yet. I read on. Some profanity of awe may have ensued. The dog isn’t telling.
Misha can travel that distance between entertaining and vulnerable by turns that palpitate the heart. Grounded, then leaping, which I suppose enacts the ballet dancing grandfather.
If you haven’t had the pleasure you should read this, or see him at VERSeFest.
If you are on Brick’s list you know, you can buy it from them directly, paper or digital or from booksellers.ca or at VERSeFest in paper, or Perfect Books later, once they restock after VERSeFest. I do hope they’ll sell out as they should.
Pearl Pirie is in Hills' Almanach des Collines, an anthology of spec fiction in the Gatineau Hills as well as in Turtle Dreams (Red Moon Press) and forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Talking About Strawberries All the Time and Kingfisher. She is an English book reviews co-editor of Haiku Canada Review and Shohyōran. Recent chapbooks: Heat Lamp (above/ground press, Dec 2025), and We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, Spring 2025). She edits for phafours press, including Crime and Ornament by Tamsyn Farr (Nov 2025). www.pearlpirie.com
