With reviews of chapbooks by Mona Gendron, Ling Ge, and Joseph Donato
The Boys Are Homophobic Sweethearts by Mona Gendron (Discordia Review, 2024)
For me, chapbooks feel like the antithesis to the mass production mentality of our society. When we read them, support them, hold them in our hands, put them on bookshelves, coffee tables, in our purses, book bags, pass them between friends, these little creatures become time capsules. They’re here and available, then boom! You blink and they’re gone. Chapbooks allow poets to experiment, play and test the waters before moving into a bigger project. Often, the results are beautifully designed treasures that might be impossible to replicate in full-length collections.
I felt this when reading The Boys Are Homophobic Sweethearts by Mona Gendron. I felt like I was holding something that wasn’t going to be available forever. It created an intimacy between me and the book, the poetry, the poet who I’ve never met and I don’t know. Gendron’s chapbook built a bridge in that moment. The Boys Are Homophobic Sweethearts is designed as the liner notes from a CD jewel case and it’s gorgeous with full colour art interspersed between the poetry (also written in colour)!
If I had to pick a quote to capture Gendron’s chapbook, I’d choose “the world is full of places / where girl = death sentence / my once suitcase / filled with false mustaches”. The Boys Are Homophobic Sweethearts oscillates between femme and masc while exploring violence, isolation and loneliness, identity and “a stranger on the internet / tells me i have a mood disorder / but all i’ve ever wanted / is to be loved unconditionally by everyone”.
The chapbook is laced with duality, it feels like a conversation between past and present, between two selves. “when i don’t wear women’s clothes / i spend all day signing leases”. As the chapbook unfolds, there’s an undeniable roughness contrasted with sharp, vulnerable lines like “i’ve been violenced all over this place / even here / in my untouchable zone / men hold me down and make me taste myself”. There’s a deep yearning to be heard and seen in these poems, to just be. Even against chaos, fear, transmisogyny and violence, Gendron’s speaker says “i need tits n’ ass / to totally eclipse this world / i want to die a woman”.
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Mona Gendron (she/her) is a Montreal-based writer, transfemme white settler, and educator. Her work has appeared in many journals, including CV2, Antilang, and The Ex-Puritan, for whom she was a 2021 Pushcart nominee. With her music project Puberty Well she has released an album, The Boys are Homophobic Sweethearts, and performed at Sled Island Music Festival in 2023, Sappyfest, and POP Montreal in 2024. Alongside the above, she has spent over a decade nurturing Montreal’s vibrant DIY music and arts community, facilitating a wide array of arts events across several venues and collectives. She is currently working on a surrealistic novel-in-verse-in-prose, Bride.
Snow Flowers by Ling Ge (Anstruther Press, 2026)
I enjoy finding books that soothe me when I read. As someone with OCD, sometimes reading can be a bit overwhelming. I gravitate towards poetry because it’s a little more forgiving on my brain. If I read slowly, without pressure, it’s a delicious way to experience language at a close proximity. My OCD brain loves rules, repetition and structure, so, when I see a poet who plays with form, not only am I intrigued, I’m washed with this divine sense of calm.
Snow flowers by Ling Ge fuses formal poetics with experimentation. The results marry structure and order with this magnetic pulse to be wild, free and indisputably its own unique creation. “Each snowflake, a brick / turning Toronto Bay into a white castle.” Snow Flowers is a gorgeous love letter to language, poetry, heritage and history, (dis)connection and time. Every poem is infused and touched by Chinese culture and history. There’s a helpful Endnotes section that contextualizes some of the poems, including the meaning of the title poem, which in Chinese, directly translates to “snowflake” (thank you Endnotes)!
The poems in Snow Flowers are vivid in their descriptions “Spring rain. New grass flows. Daisy buds tear, / seek dreams. Geese fly across the lake / and vanish.” Ge’s poetry has an atmospheric, cinematic quality that pulls the reader into corporeal, vivid scenes. I admire how even with the haiku, Ge maintains this cinematic quality, but also manages to still time before sweeping it back into motion. “desolate dock / an old boat / boarded by wildflowers”.
As much as Snow Flowers is a book of discipline and restraint, there’s a lot of play. In Never-Ending River, the poem is cut with a river in its center as it flows “humming a gurgling folk song”. There’s a never-ending quality to it, as it can be read multiple ways. One thing I kept thinking while reading Ge’s chapbook, was that it rewards both close reading and multiple reads. I kept getting this image of Ge’s poetry “guiding stray travelers to their homes” and home, in this case, felt like a wholesome collection that ignites, stirs and excites.
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Ling Ge is an immigrant author based in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and other Indigenous peoples who have lived here over time. She is a graduate of The Writer Studio at Simon Fraser University. Her short stories have appeared in Spadina Literary Review, Ricepaper, and Infusion: An Anthology of Asian Diaspora Writers. Her first published short story was nominated for a Pushcart Literary Prize. Her poems have appeared in Canadian Literature, The New Quarterly, The Heron’s Nest, Acorn, Ribbons, Wales Haiku Journal, emerge 23, and elsewhere. Snow Flowers is her debut poetry chapbook.
No One Should be Happy When I’m Not by Joseph Donato (Self published, 2026)
“What’s the difference between a sad clown / and a happy clown? / It’s all in how he paints / on his eyebrows”. I love these lines because they capture Donato’s humour, his flair for drama, melodrama and theater and this central image of the clown. Not to be punny, but in No One Should Be Happy When I’m Not, Donato sad-clowns around as he seesaws between rage and grief, sadness and melancholy all the while slapping us with this sharp, dry-spiced humour that’ll leave you howling, crying or both.
The sad clown is an intangible and ethereal presence in the chapbook. He narrates Donato’s poems as he writes complex, often taboo, but realistic takes on love (specifically the end of a relationship), grief and mental health. “How do I learn to breathe underwater / how do I live in a fishbowl / Maybe I should have been scared / of the ocean but God / I love to swim”.
I want to feel excited when I read, so, I’m the first to admit I love drama and melodrama “I’m at the age when the world’s against me / I’m face down in the swimming pool / Arthur frees the sword then stabs himself to death / He’s so dramatic”. Donato is able to traverse the dramatic in a way that feels fresh and exciting. Often poets who lean into this tone tend to move towards a very obvious embodiment of maximalism. Donato’s poems are big, but they don’t feel too big or over embellished. He’s able to accomplish a similar tone with sharp-to-the-point lines, wry humour and wit. It’s an interesting alchemy that feels like it shouldn’t work but dazzles and glitters nonetheless.
This is going to sound cliché, but you never know what the next page or even line in this chapbook will bring. Expect the unexpected, as they say. “I drive past your house on the way to school and dream / of crashing”. Everything is fair game. From random humour to gut punch images to swift emotional shifts, and sometimes, just some really gorgeous on-brand imagery “Hangnails peel like wallpaper, like oranges / I want clean walls, clean hands / citrus in the cracks / holes in the stacks”.
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Joseph Donato is a Queer writer, editor, and teacher from the Greater Toronto Area. He is a Creative Writing MFA candidate at the University of Guelph where he is completing his thesis: a short story collection of body horror. His second poetry chapbook, “No One Should Be Happy When I’m Not” is out now. “Toothache”, Joseph’s debut poetry chapbook, launched May 2023 with above/ground press. His poetry and fiction has appeared in several literary magazines and journals. Joseph is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Block Party Magazine & Press. and Overlord of Horror Pop Mag.
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
