Musical memories haunt lyric memoir

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This article was published 28/03/2026 (202 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Michael V. Smith’s lyric memoir, Soundtrack (Book*hug, 212 pages, $25), is composed of narrative poems about coming of age as a gay man in the shadow of AIDS. The collection is structured around memories evoked by specific albums from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.

Throughout these poems, Smith reaches through the pretence imposed on working-class gay men into a grief and revelry and a fundamental insistence on presence: “Without need/ to restrain themselves (…)//we open// a current of kinetic memory at the edge of our bodies.”

The last poem, (hidden track: 29/09/24), marks a shift in tone and technique. Here, Smith engages with the philosophical underpinnings of memoir — the question of what it means to write publicly about lives that are ongoing and that will change or end between the time the poem is describing, the time the poem is written and the time the book is published.

Writing about the past is “forming a future/ dilemma,” which seems only more poignant when one of the subjects is dying: “I do not want/ this printed lyric/ to claim Kim/ is dying// after he has.”

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Misha Solomon’s debut collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Brick, 130 pages, $24), traces a lineage of migration, queerness and Jewishness through coded stories and gaps in documentation. Central in the collection’s layered narrative is Ernest, the speaker’s great-grandfather, who emigrated to Canada from Central Europe in the 1920s, and his relationship with Rubin, a dancer who stayed behind.

The historical aspect of the collection proceeds through persona, epistolary and narrative poems. In addition, Solomon uses speculative techniques to address the unknowns. In Ernest Wonders, for example, Solomon makes six conjectures about Rubin’s life after Ernest left, from “Rubin drowned” to Rubin died in the death camps to Rubin lives a parallel life to Ernest. Each of these mutually exclusive conjectures is followed by a catalyst — for example, accompanying the conjecture that “Rubin survived Ernest’s/ leaving, survived the camps,/ the beatings” is the prompt “Most days, life is livable./ The children smile.”

This sense of uncertainty, of multiple conflicting possibilities, also structures the speaker’s present. In Time Travel, the speaker projects himself backward in time using his family’s history as an anchor. “If I go back ten years I find myself, room 526 in Furnald Hall, and I take my thinner face between my slightly older hands I kiss myself for just so long that we both go forward all the years we could have would have lost.”

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In The Book of Z (Talonbooks, 128 pages, $20), Rahat Kurd inhabits the persona of Zulaykha, the wife of Aziz in the Qur’an and the wife of Potifar in the Bible, in a meditation on the intersection of erotic and spiritual desires as well as a reimagining of that tradition.

This intersection and its long history are entwined with the multiple and fragmented uses of Zulaykha’s story across centuries. “Which lineage to claim — I am sometimes at a loss —/ but I wish for no plague on your houses, Abrahamic siblings.” In this section of Zulaykha Addresses the Patriarchs, Zulaykha refuses to choose between the different versions of others’ projections. “And why would I give up the hard-won friendship with myself?” she asks.

Kurd deftly draws together mystical traditions and contemporary pragmatism, mythic and historical time. “Someone wrote a song, someone left safe passage, for your voice to feel its way through the dark, like red hand marks left by painter’s thirty-six thousand years ago in the Chauvet Caves. High notes and low notes and rests that say, here is where Ms. Lauryn Hill, with only her breath, makes you feel as if her pain is going to claw its way out of your own chest.”

From this conjunction flows a moving, expansive “poetics of solidarity.”

Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River will be published by At Bay Press in the fall of 2026.