Misha Solomon : Scrapbook : Puppy Sounds

folio : Scrapbook

 

 

 

My five-pound puppy is fast asleep on my scratched-up hardwood floors. He’s on his side, his four stubby legs pointing straight away from his gently snoring body. I pick him up and his eyes briefly open, glassy and unresponsive like the whole fish my grandfather always ordered at Le Jardin du Pékin. I press him to my chest and he’s asleep, again or still, and I can hear him now, making noises that I’ve decided are contentment but could be anything or nothing. He smells overripe, a kiwi left too long in the fruit bowl, and there’s poultry-flavoured toothpaste stuck to the fur above his eye. That fur is soft, so soft, softer than any dog I’ve ever touched. I don’t know why he’s here, why we wanted him, why we have him if we don’t need him to hunt or to guide or to pull a sled. I don’t know what I feel for him, toward him, about him, but I know it isn’t love. I know I like the sounds he makes, the purrs and sighs and burbles. I know I like his warmth against my chest.

little black dog
is there a purpose to be served
by serving no purpose

  

 

“Puppy Sounds” does not appear in My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Brick Books, 2026).

 

 

 

 

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has appeared in journals across Canada and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, 2026, and 2027 (Biblioasis) and in On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House). He is a student in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. He is the author of three chapbooks, and his full-length debut, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, was released by Brick Books in March 2026. 

Misha Solomon : INTRODUCTION: Stephanie Bolster's BIODÔME: Twentieth Anniversary Edition

 

 

 

          When it was confirmed that Stephanie Bolster was to be my thesis supervisor for my poetry MA, I wrote to rob mclennan to ask that he send me copies of all of her available chapbooks. I always like to read as much as possible of what my poetry mentors and colleagues have written—I call this my “oppo research,” which is ridiculous since I view hardly any of these poets as my opposition. And certainly not Stephanie, whom I asked to work with in my application and about whom I had heard only glowing reviews from her former students.

          I knew that Stephanie was interested in zoos (it said so on her Concordia faculty profile and she had co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems, an essential anthology), but what I discovered in her Biodôme was a way of seeing, and thereby meeting, the animal world just as it should be met. In “The Arcades Project,” the chapbook’s opening poem, glass is “slanted, divided / by iron, shat at by pigeons.” The description is beautiful, but it’s not beautified. The pigeons have a subtle, surprising agency: they’re shitting at and not just on. Even here, in a poem mostly interested in Walter Benjamin’s mythic unfinished project and its Parisian subject, the life of non-human animals is impeccably rendered.

          The collection gradually and methodically grows into its animal focus, moving from arcades to ruins to gardens, from pigeon to poodle to unnamed beasts, until we get to “Where the Bear Was,” the first incontrovertible “zoo poem.” This short poem set at a Parisian zoo takes us, in only sixteen lines and a drop title, from the 21^st century to World War II and back, with a gut punch of a final line that elegantly encompasses all of history: “Once this was not even Paris.” And what is “Paris” to a bear? And what are “London, Chicago, Barcelona” to the paddocked giraffes of “Ubiquitous in This Domain”? As Stephanie handles both human and non-human concerns in her poems, we’re permitted to access the lives of both her speaker(s) and that which they see.

          In the chapbook’s titular poem, we see tamarins plunging through light thickened by snow, and then we learn that the speaker is mourning someone who has died. “This is not the difference between life and imagination.” The poem’s penultimate line serves as a kind of summary of the project: the poems of Biodôme don’t mine the difference between life and imagination, they fuse life with imagination, allowing life and imagination to, if you’ll allow me, shit at one another. These are poems of beauty without beautification, poems of observation without beatification. Zoos (and humans) simply exist here, for better or often for worse, without the sanctification sometimes found in poems that deal with the so-called natural world.

          When I was tasked with writing about a place for a PhD course taught by M.J. Thompson, I thought of the Biodôme, a place of childhood wonder and adult consternation, and with it I thought of course of Biodôme, a chapbook that confirmed for me how much I wanted to work with Stephanie Bolster. And how gratifying, how life-changing and life-affirming, how transformational her supervision has been. There are dozens and dozens of poetry collections that thank Stephanie in their acknowledgements, and each does so without routine or superficiality. It’s always clear how seen the poet has felt by Stephanie, how much of a positive effect Stephanie has had on the poet’s work. And that’s because Stephanie can see, and therefore meet, poets and their poems just where they need to be met.

          I’m thrilled that rob is reprinting this phenomenal chapbook for its 20^th anniversary, and I’m honoured that Stephanie allowed me to take the final line of “Biodôme” (“Even the briefest distance is divisible.”) as the starting line of my Biodôme chapbook. I’m sure that readers will find themselves as “rapt” as the speaker looking through daffodils in “Children’s Zoo, Central Park,” as pleasantly destabilized as the speaker is when they realize they hadn’t in fact seen daffodils, “it was too early for that or too late.”

 

 

 

 

 

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, appeared with Brick Books in March 2026. Misha Solomon’s Biodôme: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster (above/ground press, 2026) is his third chapbook.

Pearl Pirie : My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, by Misha Solomon

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

Misha Solomon : The Male Dancer

 

 

 

 

Billy Elliot was the first movie to make me cry from an emotion other than fear, but that was because, if I recall correctly, of dead mother content and not ballet content. I saw it in theatres; I would have been nine or ten.

On Modern Family, the straight actor who plays Cam, the flamboyant gay husband, does quite an amusing impression of Billy Elliot in a bad northern accent (“I just want to dance at the ballet”) that later became somewhat of a meme. 

The character of Billy is straight and the actor who plays him is straight too. But when men dance ballet, they’re seen as gay, hence the film’s central tension, other than the miners’ strike.

I learned the term “scab” from Billy Elliot, that I remember very clearly.

I do think I always wanted to dance at the ballet. The memory of the desire is vague, foggy.

Once, I asked my friend Erin to confirm that she was there when I told the assistant principal of our high school that someone had scratched “FAG” into my locker. She was, she remembered. The scene felt like something I had seen in a movie, so I was worried I had made it up.

I have recurrent pain in my feet. I went to see a podiatrist, Dr. Bluma Girzon. She took X-rays and I was flattered when she told me I should have been a ballet dancer because of my very high arches, which also put added pressure on my heels and the balls of my feet when I wear thin-soled shoes.

I went to a few ballet classes with Rosalie, my fiancé’s cousin. They were actually ballet-barre workout classes. I think one of the teachers told me I was a natural, but I could really just be making that up. Anyway, I found the barre elements a bit too strenuous

I find male ballet dancers to be attractive, generally, by which I mean I like the body type imposed upon them by the rigours of the form and also by troubling aesthetic expectations and codes. But there’s something deeply unerotic about seeing them on stage, possibly because of the false, Ken-like modesty of their dance belts.

When my great-aunt Cynthia told me that her father danced ballet before fleeing Romania, I made some immediate assumptions about him, assumptions that were somewhat bolstered by other knowledge I had, like that he was less successful in business than some of his peers.

Cynthia, whom I call Yaya, probably said that she thought her father danced ballet before leaving Romania.

In CEGEP, we had to write and perform a short two-person play. I insisted that Tiffany and I wear matching black tights, which I bought using our mutual friend Lauren’s employee discount at American Apparel, even though tights weren’t remotely essential to our characters.

My parents put me on a soccer team when I was a child, then took me off it when I did nothing but wander around the field snapping my fingers. They put me in karate, chess, piano. They never forced me to continue any of the activities I didn’t like, which was all of them. But they never put me in ballet. I never asked.

My legs look good in tights. My mother always says I have better legs than either she or my father has. Maybe they’re my great-grandfather’s legs. Maybe, just like me, he never even danced.

 

 

 

 

 

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, is coming out 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.