I Hate Parties
by Jes Battis
Nightwood Editions
102 pages
$20
Jes Battis’s I Hate Parties is a nostalgic poetry collection that chronicles adolescence in the ‘80s and ‘90s—social anxiety and Discmans included—and is peppered with musings from an adult navigating the tumultuous 2020s. I Hate Parties has a playful, endearing tone, yet doesn’t shy away from the realities of growing up queer and autistic.
At the heart of the collection is an underlying tension between the desire to fit in and the alienation that comes with being neurodivergent. The titular poem, “I Hate Parties,” is an ode to the discomfort of socializing, noting the speaker’s need to “check the mental map / of what you should and shouldn’t do at parties” in an attempt to fit in, and their lament that “sometimes people are their own bright parties / a string of lights, but I’m the bulb left blank.”
Battis has the deft ability to use mundane imagery to conjure up intense emotions. After mapping the many ways a party can feel torturous, Battis ends with a reminder that not being at one with the right person can be a more satisfying form of social connection: “Let’s use the secret door / my favourite part is leaving all those parties / with you, cold air, warm cheek, hushed little footnotes.”
The queer experience also permeates the collection. “The Odd” memorializes Vancouver’s Odyssey Nightclub, a vital space for the city’s LGBTQIA+ community before it closed in 2018. This poem captures both the importance of the nightclub and the speaker’s newfound freedom as a sheltered queer kid who has just moved to the big city.
Battis’s prose enhances the stream-of-consciousness feeling of a chaotic night out. The poem, and the night, begins with the speaker “in sweatpants because [they] don’t / understand how gay bars work,” because they “grew up in Chilliwack, where gay people stayed in the basement watching Four Weddings and a Funeral on VHS.” By the end of the poem, the speaker has ridden a wave of alcohol and sensory overload and found some semblance of community, saying, “We’re on the dance floor, all the Michaels and Rons, every petshop boy, and Paul Monette is whispering something about the last watch of the night, but it’s too loud.”
While not every poem hits with the same emotional intensity, the collection is strongly written overall and pulsing with playful nostalgia. It is rife with references to the ever-changing media of the ‘80s and ‘90s, from VHS tapes to skipping CDs and the pop culture of the era. One of the most endearingly Millennial things I have ever read is “We stage a scene from Sailor Moon / where Tuxedo Mask is stalked / by a gay alien.” I Hate Parties combines weighty topics and relatable anecdotes to create a collection that is at once complicated, hilarious, somber, and exuberant.
