Welcome to the first iteration of Michael Russell’s new column: Itty Bitty Reviews. At the tail end of Pride Month 2025 we’re highlighting three poetry collections from queer poets Matthew Walsh, Loch Baillie, and Benjamin C. Dugdale.
Cover image of the Miramichi Bridge taken by TMR’s own Alison Manley!
Terrarium by Matthew Walsh (Icehouse Poetry, 2024)
After reading Terrarium by Matthew Walsh I’m filled with an urgency to say: This is the kind of poetry we need more of. These poems are drenched in an honest intimacy that feel like they’re whispering secrets in your ear, they’re like conversations with a good and trusted friend where both humour and heartbreak are held in the same breath. Throughout Terrarium, Walsh’s speaker feels close, relatable and grounded. “It’s hard to admit to myself / that I have a life / in this body.”
Terrarium paints the everyday, the mundane, and it takes the world around us in all its dirt and grime, beauty and humour and makes poetry of it. “From the sky I imagine California a long / black cocktail dress the night lights / amethyst and citrine against the arm / muscle of the sea…” There is a quiet melancholy that cuts through the book as it navigates cityscapes, jokes, pain, sex, depression, identity. Walsh does this all in an accessible conversational style that welcomes the reader in. Seriously. I feel like I’m best friends with the speaker in this book.
This is the kind of poetry we need more of.
As I was reading, I noticed myself inching closer to the speaker. It didn’t feel like there was a fourth wall between us. Walsh hadn’t done anything to really break it, but this is the power of their poetry—to make you feel like you belong, like you’re part of the poem, the book, the experience. There’s no separation, only inclusion. Their poems mirror the everyday so sharply that when I picked up their book, I wasn’t escaping reality, merely just looking at it through a slightly different lens.
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Matthew Walsh grew up in Nova Scotia and now lives in Toronto. Their poems have appeared in Joyland, the Capra Review, the Antigonish Review, the Malahat Review, and Geist; in a chapbook entitled ICQ; and in their celebrated book-length collection These are not the potatoes of my youth, a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards.
ice, dove, parachute by Loch Baillie (Cactus Press, 2024)
Confession: I love to find a poet I admire then devour everything they’ve released and/or will release. It’s part hunger, part adoration, but mostly curiosity. I want to see how they grow from book to book, how their themes shift and style evolves, what risks they take or don’t.
Loch Baillie has been on fire lately. His debut full-length River Running (icehouse poetry) is forthcoming in 2026. His debut chapbook Cintronella (Anstruther Press) made ripples as it wove a quiet gravity around a summer-esque world. So, I was eager to see how ice, dove, parachute would fit between these projects.
ice, dove, parachute feels like a book of mouths and what mouths hold: language, sounds, secrets, histories, sex, love, stories, emotions. Through bilingualism (French and English) Baillie explores the intimate, humorous and the challenging moments of a queer love story and how language bonds two folks together.
In the final poem, “Film de cul,” a poem structured as a porn video, Baillie’s speaker is at his most vulnerable and assured. “If I leave, do you trust me / to come back?” Baillie challenges the reader to look beyond the immediate porn structure of the poem to see that this is a love poem. “Film de cul” interrogates the stereotype that queer relationships can be boiled down to simple formulas (hookup apps + sex = queer relationships and identities.) Baillie’s speaker reminds us at the end of the poem “I’m still in this bed. / I have nothing left / to say about leaving.”
ice, dove, parachute is layered with queerness. For all the twists and turns in the chapbook, for which there are many; few extreme, some sharp, many firmly grounded in the everyday I find Baillie’s speaker consistently “fell in love with the idea of / beating his life / into something complex, and wonderful / and worth living.”
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Originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, Loch Baillie is a queer poet and writer living on the south shore of Quebec City. In 2023, he was mentored by ReLit Award-winning poet Simina Banu as part of the Quebec Writers’ Federation mentorship program. Loch’s writing has appeared in Font, Maclean’s, Maybe Magazine, Society Pages, and yolk literary. When he is not writing, Loch can be found teaching English, reading a book, or submerged in a body of water.
The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux by Benjamin C. Dugdale (Gordon Hill Press, 2023)
There’s something special about reading a collection that defies confines, expectations and social norms. Even more thrilling when (wholly in my opinion) it gives the middle finger to canon and embraces its own identity. The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is a book-length long poem that leans into experimentation, weirdness and wildness in both form and tone. More importantly, it takes the reader on an unforgettable ride from start to finish.
The Repoetic, as described in the book’s (very helpful and detailed) acknowledgements section is a “reboot” of Saint-Pol-Roux’s La Répoétique. Now, I had no idea about the original text or author, but as with many “after” poems, you don’t need prior knowledge of the original to appreciate the poem in front of you. I didn’t google who Saint-Pol-Roux was or skip to the end because I didn’t feel the need. There weren’t any pressing questions that couldn’t wait until I finished. Dugdale kept me hooked throughout. They fleshed out a world that was dizzying and captivating, that kept me thinking: I want more.
The Repoetic bursts with queerness, madness and pop culture mainstays (The Simpsons, Vampires, Tinder, Dido and more!) An issue I sometimes find with long poems is they can drag on, get lost in themselves, or for lack of a better word, feel boring. The Repoetic feels fresh, exciting, full of momentum and keenly aware of itself and its pacing. I found myself gasping and grasping at the air while reading, hollering as I eagerly turned page after page until “BEING HEALED BY: CUMBATH.”
On a literary level, The Repoetic feels like an event worthy of celebration. Through experimentation, Dugdale pushes the boundaries of what poetry can do. By doing so they excel the limitations of what is usually defined/confined/gatekept as poetry. This book is full of risks. I felt eager, anxious, dragged to the edge of my seat anticipating the next word, waiting for “those driven shards of light at the threshold of his flesh, scared to death to find what comes next.”
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Benjamin C. Dugdale is a poet & experimental filmmaker currently living in Rural Alberta (Treaty 7 Territory). B’s writing can be found in places like GEIST, Plentiude, Riddle Fence, giallo, fillingStation, &c., and their films have screened across the globe at festivals such as Sick’N’Wrong, VideoDrunk, GottaMinute, Bideodromo, and London Experimental. B also reads for PANK and ARC Poetry, and sometimes publishes as bonny CD. Their updates can be found at benjamindugdale.ca. Their debut chapbook, Saint Rat O’Sphere’s Formica Canticle Poems, was published in 2020 by Anstruther Press, and their most-recently completed experimental film project, Contents Under Pressure, is distributed by the CFMDC. The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux is their debut full length poetry collection.
Michael Russell (he/they) is the queer, mad mother monster behind two chapbooks, gallery of heartache (forthcoming from 845 Press) and Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press). They are the coauthor of chapbook Split Jawed with Elena Bentley (forthcoming from Collusion Books). As always, he thinks you’re fantabulous. Insta: @michael.russell.poet
