One poem in Misha Solomon’s My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet ventriloquizes a Jewish comedian doing a stand-up skit in a Catskills resort: “I kid! I joke! I josh! I’m bored —.” This exclamation maps onto the experience of reading this collection, which yo-yos from the profane to the mundane and back again. At one point the speaker admits to googling “old-fashioned word for semen” to improve his poems’ historical accuracy (“I’m trying, I really am, to do this research thing,” he writes). Its fast-paced dialogue and witty asides conjure a speaker both overly confident and anxious about his work’s reception: “Do these poems convey that I am, at my core, a good person?”

But underneath the speaker’s self-proclaimed “millennial irony” is a sincere longing for connection. The collection is named for a fictionalized version of Solomon’s great-grandfather, who danced ballet in pre-Holocaust Romania. In a moment of formal daring, Solomon intersperses reflections about coming into his queerness with letters his great-grandfather, later settled in Montreal, might have written to his would-be lover, Rubin.  

Compared to his great-grandfather, the poems’ speaker has been less fettered by material suffering , and enjoys a domestic partnership complete with engagement rings, matching IKEA plates, a dog, an apartment , time to think and write poems. On the other hand, this leisure time is also what allows him to stare into the abyss of his deepest problems. For all its campiness, Solomon’s poetry is also touched by diasporic trauma, loss, and yearning. Solomon is smart to give Rubin the last lines, allowing that loss and yearning to take on a life of its own: “dear reader … I don’t believe in you / I choose to live beyond these pages I / decide that I survived.”mRb