‘Beautiful … tender … evanescent’
I Hate Parties
by Jes Battis
Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2024
$19.95 / 9780889734809
Reviewed by Carellin Brooks
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Why read poetry? With its flippant title and cover sporting confetti and an illustrated cat, I Hate Parties might not seem at first glance like the best way to answer that question. Yet the Jes Battis’ book offers multiple clues in its relatively slender 101 pages. This volume is filled with beautiful poems, tender and evanescent, that delight the reader in their discovery.
Among these, “The Repair Shop” stands out. A simple metaphor of repair encompasses watching TV, a parent’s heart attack, and their own queer identity. “I’ve never wished / to be fixed / but wouldn’t say no / to the kiss / of a delicate weld.” I Hate Parties is not only playful–the title and cover don’t lie–but consistently delivers such moments of nuance.
There is poetry even in the throwaway observations offered by the poet: “For every lost key / in the master’s bowl / there is a startled lock.” The characterization of the lock lifts this casual stanza from simple reporting to a new way of looking at the world. This is, dare I say it, one of poetry’s main benefits to the reader.
Stillness and memory, some of the others, are additional rewards of this collection. “There’s a laptop locked in the amber of ’97,” the poet writes in “Glass Crack Time Machine.” A time when “it was fine to be queer / and silent” allows the writer to meditate on the obsolete technologies they once used to reach out to others. How far do we get from our younger selves, the emails we once composed on Eudora [1988-2006, RIP —Ed.] to entice potential loves?
Part-timer west coaster Battis (The Winter Knight) doesn’t shy from pop-culture engagement in these poems, but happily the result reads as anything but a gimmick. Sure, you will read about Bond movies, Days of Our Lives, and gay dating apps called Grindr and Scruff, but always in ways that slip beneath the slick, shiny surfaces. “Brad rising wet from Lauren’s pool, / his speedo a black hole sucking in / small-town queers,” from “Marlene is Once Again Possessed,” brings to mind those endless dim afternoons in plaid-upholstered living rooms, eyes fixed on the box, words unsaid as another season of nefarious soap opera plots spools out. So not like life, so like life.
There are minor missteps in this collection. Battis’ titular poem tries and fails to establish a mobile metaphor of footnotes in unexpected places: a garden plot, discarded socks, the shoes of partygoers, and so forth. Experiments with form don’t always stand up. But Battis’ poems are anchored in time and space, typically, giving them gravity. They call up moments of longing as the poet gazes back and rewrites the world, as in “My Boyfriend Names Every Bond Movie Chronologically”: “someone tells my / boyfriend, at twelve, that kissing a boy will / invite neither miracle nor disaster, simply an / unexpected view.”
These are clever poems, saved by their heart. Battis mostly resists the urge to indulge in mere wordplay, although given their skill at it they could easily create work that is dazzling, albeit without substance. Instead, we get glimpses of a life: Prairie upbringing, years partying in Vancouver, grad school, teaching, friends and lovers from teenage years to adulthood, sickness, cats.
Battis doesn’t eschew current events, either. Poems address Saskatchewan’s anti-trans kid bill, mention the pandemic, describe and explore, in “Tism,” how online monikers both recognize and flatten:
TikTok is full of Homeric epithets like
bi wife energy and the latest is something
called tism rizz, which refers to a curious
charm possessed by autistic people, a kind
of mental catnip that makes us irresistible
as partners.
You can see the poet here grappling for a handhold: in the ephemeral social constructions thrown up by current culture, in classical forms like “Homeric epithets.” Is meaning to be found in the intentionally glancing gaze and the fetishization, however affectionate, of neurodiversity? Where do quotidian realities like inadequate health supports fit in with shiny catchphrases or Ancient Greek allusions? As the poem muses, “I’ve never felt charming / though people call me that. Every ex / has frowned at me, in the way you’d perceive / a maple bug who appears in the middle / of winter. Why? How?” The questions are also Battis’ as they grapple with who they have been and have become: the bug who once again misread the signs of spring’s thaw.
But in Battis’ poetry, the key never stays lost. The bug survives its unlikely season. “There’s a trick to unbreak / every heart, only learned / by touching here and here / and here.” So ends “The Repair Shop.” In this poet’s precise, masterful hands, such movements of reaching out to another, however lightly, make an otherwise unintelligible world fall into place.
[Editor’s note: Jess Battis will appear at an event at Upstart & Crow (1387 Railspur Alley, Vancouver) on October 20 at 4:30pm. The joint reading and discussion will also feature Edmonton-based Premee Mohammed.]
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Carellin Brooks is the author of the poetry collection, Learned, and four other books. She lives in Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Learned (Book*hug, 2022), a poetry collection about Brooks’ time at Oxford and in the fleshpots of London, was reviewed in BCR by Linda Rogers. Brooks has reviewed Jen Currin, Daniel Zomparelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Mx. Sly, Debbie Bateman, Michael V. Smith, Buffy Cram and Maryanna Gabriel for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster