My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet

Two timelines intersect, weaving an alternate reality of queer ancestors, half-truths, domesticity, and desire in spite of past and present persecution.

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.