“All language springs from the oral…oral language is part of the diversity of the way people express themselves. To me, it should be the overwhelming literary force of the world.”
Lillian Allen from an Interview in Room Magazine (ahead of the 2022 poetry contest).
Knowing Charlie Petch as a spoken word poet, as a librettist, dramaturge and performer, it is easy to drop into the poetry in their latest book, Infinite Audition because the language comes alive on the page. It’s as though I am sitting in a theatre listening to them, being performed, just for me. Naturally, before I reached the end of the first poem, “Good News,” I was reading them aloud, trying my best to hear Charlie’s uniquely joyful voice, but flailing. I pulled back, allowed them to whisper to me, all the grief, loss, struggle and resistance that comes alive in the first act of this incredible collection.
The first act constructs a world where artists break free from the constraints of the pandemic and find themselves singing, dancing and breathing in the streets, coming alive in community. There are scenes where closets become dollhouses: “I’m just saying maybe you should tear me down and reconstruct me into a dollhouse… I don’t want to be a closet anymore I don’t want anyone to find me,” a dollhouse where a poet might find a quiet place to disappear. There is a scene where a lighting tech describes their “Photophobia”, a poem that is as much about the fear of light as it is about grief and disability: “I used to think moths were enamoured with light now I know it traps them.” And in “That Time I Was Beaten Up at a Party, Circa 1992” a poet imagines themselves in a past life and “sometimes people say don’t you wish you could be young again and I say fuck no I can’t even believe I survived the first time and I never lie about my age because that’s how I celebrate survival.”
This isn’t the only time my past life meets Petch’s past life in a dark club like the Boom Boom Room. Anyone who lived in Toronto in the late 80s/early 90s will know this place, will know what this time did to bodies trying to find love and acceptance, bodies willing to pay any price. But it is knowing Petch’s current transmasculine identity that the reader feels a tender empathy for the beautiful past self, dancing around waiting for the moment they can dance and be “no one’s gender” (from “Club Q,” the first poem in the second act.”)
The second act opens to an entirely new brilliant world. As I scan the QR code that directs me to Charlie Petch’s Bandcamp, and to the soundtrack for Act II: All Horns and Drums and Triumphant Strings, I pause. Why must I listen to all the music first before I allow myself to fully enter Act II? Because dogs sing in the first song, for the poem “Club Q,” because I needed to feel the music before I blended them in my brain, because there exists in this music a gorgeous, enchanted, ethereal world where I wanted to exist for a few moments – like sitting in the theatre while the orchestra plays. And it turns out music and reading don’t blend well in my brain, but second time around – pure magic! The second act is a reminder to the reader of the brilliance of Petch’s dramaturgy, their natural ability to combine music with language becomes evident in this section. And there are poems that are meant to be seen, as in “My Uterus Meets My Breasts in a Medical Waste Facility and They Go Out for Drinks to Talk Shit About Me,” a sort of uterus and boobs walk into a bar poem that ends with the poet having to save them from themselves, ending with a touching letter.
Dear my old body parts
I know you tried so hard
to make me feel whole
maybe
it would help to think
that this was me
loving you so deeply
that I set you free.
In “Act III: The Nothing to Lose” my childhood self’s little dreams come true, the little me who read poetry at an audition for Fiddler on the Roof as a seven-year- old, who can now only dream of being a talented spoken word poet, but who can still dream, can’t she? I read – performed – all these aloud, in my most theatrical voice because (although many are not meant to be performed by me) these Poetic Monologues for Audition demanded a voice that existed outside my head. For Pinocchio’s dreams of being a boy dancing among the trees, and Medusa’s sisters’ grief and anger raging beyond my bedroom walls, for Victor’s songs floating in the wind and for “Things I Took From my Hospital Jobs” to be known to the world, they had to be performed standing up.
Dealing in death taught me
how to live
because I know that someday
I may only be a body
defined by need
level of infection
and semi-private
or private insurance
and I will enter that hospital knowing
I chased
my joy
when I could
Infinite Audition exists for me now as a piece of art that is more than a collection of poems I once read, a few monologues I performed embarrassingly unqualified in my bedroom, or as in invitation into Petch’s younger world, this book is a reminder what it means to be a creator, and how brilliantly some hold the most intimate honest-to-god painful truths to their chests, and with all their love, hand it over to us, trusting us to not only hear all these words, but to grasp at them as they float above us, because without reaching, without holding them in our hands for a few hours at least, that diversity of expression Lillian Allen speaks of, and all the precious lives embodied within them, will exist beyond our understanding, and what a loss that will be for us all.
Infinite Audition is available to purchase directly from Brick Books or from your favourite independent bookseller.
Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for the speakNORTH national festival, winner of the Sheri-D Golden Beret Award from The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it’s a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. Their debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books), won the 2022 ReLit Award, and was named “Best of 2021” by The Walrus. Their film with Opera QTO, Medusa’s Children, premiered 2022. They have been featured on the CBC’s Q, were the Writer In Residence for Berton House (2023), were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2021. Their solo show “No one’s special at the hot dog cart” debuted at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2024.
Publisher: Brick Books (September 1, 2025)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.75″ | 126 pages
ISBN: 9781771316552
Alison Gadsby writes in Tkaronto/Toronto where she lives in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Her story collection Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive(Guernica Editions) was listed as CBC Books for Spring 2026. Her debut novel, Dreams of the Weary is forthcoming (Palimpsest Press, 2028). Alison is the founder/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series.
