The great thing about reading books by people whose experience is different from yours, and probably the reason book-banners want to narrow the possibilities of what’s available for us to read, is that you get a glimpse of what the lives of others might be like. That peek into someone else’s consciousness might generate understanding or empathy or at least a sense that everyone has their own struggles and joys and perhaps we could just let them be, if we can’t muster anything more engaged than mere tolerance. Jes Battis’s recent book of poems, I Hate Parties, is (for me) an example. I’ve never been a queer boy struggling through adolescence (my straight struggles were hard enough), or a queer man dealing with living in a community that would rather not know, thank you very much, and this book gives me a glimpse into what those experiences are like. But, more than those pragmatic or utilitarian concerns, I Hate Parties is a lot of fun. It crackles with sass and joy and playfulness.

The book’s four sections are roughly and recursively chronological, and also roughly and recursively thematic: adolescence, adulthood, autism, and illness. All serious stuff, but considered lightly (sometimes) and occasionally angrily, as in “Pronoun Policy,” a pissed-off Jeremiad about Saskatchewan’s provincial government and its attack on trans kids (I was at the demonstration the poem recounts). The poems crackle with fixed forms—regular stanzas, a variation on a pantoum, a sestina, a villanelle—which provide containers for the experiences and emotions they convey. But the book isn’t slavish in its use of form: I love the prose-poem “The Odd” and the long, irregular stanzas of “The Most Immersive Experience.” I love the range of references here, too; Socrates sits near Scaramanga, Daleks and Days of Our Lives with the Odyssey. And the surprising turns phrase, the real joy of reading poetry and the reason generative AI can’t really do it:

For every lost key

in the master’s bowl

there is a startled lock.

The predictive text function on my phone couldn’t deal with those lines, and befuddling the AI that techbros want to control us with makes my happiness immeasurable.

I Hate Parties has been getting all kinds of attention, which it deserves. I only knew its author as a fiction writer, and clearly they excel in multiple genres.