I Hate Parties by Jes Battis

Reviewed by Selena Mercuri

Jes Battis’s I Hate Parties is a collection that navigates the strained architecture of social performance, the charged terrain of neurodivergence, and the layered intimacy of queer relationships. With precision, humour, and moments of devastating tenderness, Battis crafts a poetics of resistance to legibility, diagnostic simplification, and the tidy affect of “coping.” These poems are filled with the static of misread signals and misaligned expectations.

The collection offers a profound exploration of interiority. In language that is spare and efficient, Battis captures the minor ruptures of daily life with astonishing acuity: “I've managed to sunburn / a single knee and later I'll destroy / the bathroom as the cat waits / by the door wondering what / strange closet I've disappeared in,” they write, offering an image at once absurd and profoundly human. The speaker’s body serves as both subject and stage.

There is a strong sense of intimacy to these poems. Battis embraces emotional instability to beautifully render a moment of relational upheaval:

“When I tell you / about the job offer / in Saskatchewan / you push me / like a bumper car / crying / as our verb / slips its track.”

Here, love is destabilized not by distance, but by its own grammar—by the difficulty of naming a feeling, particularly while inside it.

Many poems in the collection circle themes of neurodivergent masking and social misalignment. In “Spidey Sense,” the speaker confronts the language of institutional normalization head-on:

“At the centre for re- / alignment / I read pamphlets / on how to be socially appropriate. / I tell a story about / Monopoly pieces and empathy. // High-functioning shit-show. / Low-needs. / Lo-fi. / Masking queen.”

Battis’s lyric is often fractured and declarative, eschewing ornament in favour of rhythmic punch and tonal complexity. There is a cumulative coherence to the collection’s architecture. Each section—Penalties, Calamities, Episodes, Transits—traces a passage through constraint and expression.

I Hate Parties is a remarkable debut that finds truthfulness in the face of disorientation, and beauty in the fragments we gather while surviving.

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About the Author

Jes Battis (they/them) teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. They’ve published poems in The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review and Poetry Is Dead, among other literary magazines. They’ve also published creative nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Strange Horizons. They are the author of the Occult Special Investigator series (shortlisted for the Sunburst Award), the Parallel Parks series and, most recently, The Winter Knight with ECW.

Book Details

Nightwood Editions
ISBN: 9780889714809
Paperback / softback
5.5 in x 8 in - 102 pp
Publication Date: 14/09/2024