The Woodlot

by Chris Banks

I’ve been reading Finger Exercises for Poets by Dorianne Laux lately, and so I’ve borrowed her term ‘personal universe’, a phrase she uses to describe the work of the American Poet Ruth Stone, to segue into my first Fall review of the new poetry collection I Hate Parties by Jes Battis (Nightwood Editions 2024).

After reading I Hate Parties by Jes Battis, a book that constructs a rich, layered poetic universe by placing Battis’s own personal identity (queer, autistic, non-binary) under a magnifying glass, I have come to two conclusions: one you should go read this book immediately, and two, Jes Battis and I would have been good friends if they went to my small town high-school. 

I say this as someone very familiar with the Telenova of small-town, Canadian middle-school awkwardness– that feeling of being at odds amongst all the ice rink hockey players driving pick up trucks and the endless Bon Jovi sing-alongs.

Battis’s collection builds poems from the deceptively simple line, the controlling image, the stacking of allusions together, both the narrative verve and the texture of memoir, weaving in pop culture references that run the gamut from Plato to Tori Amo’s Little Earthquakes to Brenda Shaughnessy’s So Much Snyth, while also layering in timely discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights.

For me, the best poems in the collection are the ones where the language ‘crackles’ with new meaning, or simmers beneath the more uniform line-lengths, where the command of the poetic line and the gravitas of Battis’s personal universe meet. Look at Battis’s poem “Dubbed” which makes the villanelle, not only look easy, but inevitable:

Dubbed

This summer is for barbeques and lies,
Bon Jovi’s voice burns holy as he sings,
I notice that out hands are the same size.

I dream about the ketchup on your fries,
And think of giving you my father’s ring,
This summer is for barbeques and lies.

Your hockey glove, the sweet reek of surprise,
Fits. You grin. I forfeit everything.
I notice that our hands are the same size.

I feel your sweat diminish at it dries,
We melt the ice, devouring everything,
This summer is for barbeques and lies.

The mixtape reels and cracks from side to side,
We meet as holy palmers, trembling,
I notice that our hands are the same size.

No record of your dangerous surprise,
We tense ourselves for all that autumn brings;
This summer is for barbeques and lies,
I notice that our hands are the same size.

Because my own child identifies as queer, non-binary, and autistic, I appreciated the long form poems “Pronoun Policies” and “Tism” from which this is the beginning:

Other poems use the controlling image as the engine of a poem, like in “Triple Axel” and “Draft Poems”, but, at times, in these poems I felt the narrative took over from the line so these poems felt less substantial to me than the longer poems. Here is the beginning of “Triple Axel:” 

I pretend to be ill
so I can watch figure skating
at Lillehammer. It’s 1994
and my mom and I are united
in our hatred of Elvis Stojko
whose quads feel empty
like a bear bluff-charging.

This stanza feels looser, more of a vignette, the last two lines being the real payoff, but the poetic momentum and accretion of meaning picks up later when Battis starts to build metaphor on top of pop culture allusions on top of stark imagery:

This: the gayest thing to watch
in Chilliwack at the time. Both
Brians locked in combat. Galindo
screaming for joy at the US
Championship. Voice of Toller
Cranston in our ears, smooth
as fresh ice. They all dance
around me, skates winking fire,
gold trim, epaulettes, death
spiral of AIDS before
the cocktail. It spins us
still, and we are snow
under the blade.

So I guess my personal preference is for the longer poems like “Glass Crack Time Machine” and “My Boyfriend Names Every Bond Movie Chronologically”, poems that from their titles to their aesthetic line-lengths to their condensing of a highly personal universe wrapped up in surprising “one-two punch” imagery exude authority and surprises.

Some of my favourite lines from I Hate Parties  are “Your dad / is a thin switchblade. His eyes / carve our initials” which as someone who grew up in small town Ontario not playing hockey and fell a little outside societal norms, I feel really seen. There are so many other lines, like “Zamboni presses a deep kiss/ that clean ice smell filling you” or ”Your occasional laugh / cracking a crème brûlée to reveal a sea of / gold, the way Socrates describes goodness as / an even wave swallowing us all”, which make this poetry collection very rewarding.

In I Hate Parties by Jes Battis, the speaker shines an important spotlight on issues of neurodiversity and queer acceptance made all the more awkward, more poignant, by the personal universe Battis constructs from adolescent years growing up in small town Canada, but it is Battis’s play with language, their range of allusions and bright-burning lyricism, that makes the strength of their poetry shine through. Like a television show-runner, Battis leads their reader through the awkwardness of queer first-crushes, small town hockey nights, the suppression of autistic meltdowns at the grocery store, and after every episode described, every poem read, I find myself thinking of “the best and worst parties” of my own life, which is what good poetry is supposed to do.

Please go out and purchase a copy of “I Hate Parties” by Jess Battis and read it for yourself!