My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet by Misha Solomon

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? My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet 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. With profound vision, voice, and craft, Solomon sets a new and powerful precedent for speculative poetic histories, allowing intimacy to find a way through memories real, imagined, and desired.

Praise for My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet

“Misha Solomon—being a deeply hilarious, introspective, smart storyteller—is dreaming into his ancestry to create this excellent collection that troubles the want for queer ancestry, for children, for desire, for peace, purpose, and resolution in one’s domestic life. Solomon’s voice is all his own. These climatic poems sing with great rhythm and wit across an array of forms where you can feel Solomon having great fun as a poet. Armed with a fresh voice full of play, wonder, profanity, and lush story, My Great Grandfather Danced Ballet is a stunning debut from your new favorite poet.”—Danez Smith, author of Bluff: Poems

“The poems of Misha Solomon’s My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet transcend the boundaries of and lacunae within a familial lineage to present us with a relentlessly inventive and endearing experience of queer connection. We are introduced to Ernest, a figure based on Solomon’s own grandfather who danced ballet in pre-Holocaust Romania, as he navigates his family’s emigration to Montreal while writing letters to his former lover, Rubin. Their epistolary exchange is both tender and electric, quotidian and erotic, and demonstrates Solomon’s exceptional poetic range. Complementary poems also explore the author’s ‘queer mundanity’ and desire to recover from the gaps of Jewish diasporic experience and intergenerational bond. This work is an introduction to a powerful new voice in Canadian poetry.”—Liz Howard, author of Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

“The conversational meets the confessional in Misha Solomon’s My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, a formally daring, stunningly tender, and frequently hilarious exploration of queerness, Jewishness, domestic intimacy, and ancestral lineage. Moving in time and place from present-day Montreal to New York to the eponymous ballet dancer’s native Romania in the early 20th century, this genre-bending, polyphonic collection interweaves stories and lives with verve and virtuosity. These are poems of queer joy as much as they are of longing and desire, poems that interrogate personal subjectivity and the narratives we inherit. A truly astonishing and unforgettable debut.”—Lisa Richter, author of Sublunary

“When I read a book, I try to keep my phone far away, but as I read Misha Solomon’s beautiful debut, it occurred to me that there could be a third place, not quite phone and not quite book, deserving my attention, and that Solomon was its ferryman. A hilarious and harrowing collection, the whole way through.”—Ben Ladouceur, author of I Remember Lights