TtD supplement #276 : seven questions for Misha Solomon

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022), and his work has recently appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Malahat Review, and Riddle Fence. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2026.

His poems “(Help Me Choose a Photo of) My Engagement Ring (to Post on Instagram),” “I Didn’t Call My Mother” and “Duplex Duplex” appear in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “(Help Me Choose a Photo of) My Engagement Ring (to Post on Instagram),” “I Didn’t Call My Mother” and “Duplex Duplex.”

A: These three poems have disparate origins, but they’re all explorations of a kind of “queer mundanity” and a discomfort with “growing up” in homonormative ways.

I wrote "(Help Me Choose a Photo of) My Engagement Ring (to Post on Instagram)” for a Hybrid Forms workshop with Sina Queyras during my recent MA at Concordia — we were asked to bring in work to introduce ourselves, and this poem captured a lot of what I was writing and thinking about at the time. It will next appear in my debut full-length, coming from Brick Books in 2026. I wrote “I Didn’t Call My Mother” as part of a writing activity with my fiancé Guillaume Denault. And I wrote “Duplex Duplex,” which owes a debt of gratitude to the form’s creator Jericho Brown, as part of some sort of form-per-day challenge that Carlos Pittella shared with me — I don’t think either of us got past day two or three.

Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: These poems are a bit “lighter” than the work I’ve been doing lately. And they’re more grounded in the real and immediate domestic sphere. Lately I’ve been writing weirder, wilder stuff about (non-)reproduction that brings in a lot of animal facts I’ve had rattling around in my brain since I was a child.

Q: What prompted this shift towards a lighter approach, and how do those shifts reveal themselves?

A: For better or for worse (probably for worse), I almost always go into a poem with a “topic” in mind, and the topics of these poems couldn’t be taken too seriously. Maybe “light” is the wrong word. Maybe “seriously” is the wrong word. I guess I just wanted or needed the poems to be a little funny, to poke some fun at their domestic trappings, possibly to allow for some of the underlying emotion to exist within them.

Q: Do you consider this a shift in your writing generally, or more of an expansion?

A: Honestly, I hardly consider it a shift. More of a… modulation. I think humour/darkness/weirdness are each always bubbling under the surface of each of my poems, and I sometimes let one or more of them… come to a boil? Humour is particularly difficult for me to modulate. I’ve been told I use it to undercut emotion. I’m not how much of that is conscious.

Q: Do you have any models for the types of work you’ve been attempting? Any particular writers or works at the back of your head as you write?

A: Frank O’Hara, always. Danez Smith has been in my head a lot lately, especially after having had the pleasure of working with them at Banff earlier this year. And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Nate Lippens’s writing, after devouring his two short novels My Dead Book and Ripcord.

Q: With two published chapbooks and a full-length debut forthcoming, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I feel that I’ve moved away from try to engineer or engender a certain reaction (usually shock) in a reader. I try to give in to mystery and open-endedness, and to bring in more and more research-creation. I see my work, or at least I hope I see my work, heading to a place that is at once formless and accessible, that doesn’t fit neatly into any categories but can be relatively widely read and enjoyed.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Sorry for the delay on this last answer, I had to go to my spin class. (Do NOT edit this out. Your readers need to know that I am newly very into spinning.)

Because of my ongoing desire to “complete tasks” due to an obsessive, productivity-pilled mind, I rarely return to works. Am I allowed to admit that? I think Grease and The Wizard of Oz are the only movies I have seen multiple times.  Anyway — to reenergize my work, I read a poem from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara and use some element of the poem as a prompt. Also, I take workshops and studios to reenergize my work — I always love Sarah Burgoyne’s poetry studios, which have been immensely inspiring and productive for me. Recently, I took a great workshop with Susan Gillis hosted by the QWF, and I’ll be taking one with Jay Ritchie this spring. I also have a generative poetry group (with André Babyn and Sasha Manoli) and a workshop/reading group (with Madelaine Caritas Longman, Patrick O’Reilly, Carlos Pittella, Melanie Power, and Sarah Wolfson) and the work of all those incredible poets is always reenergizing. I also read non-poetic work to power my work — lately that’s been stuff like Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson.