I’m just going to say it: Concerning the Dinner is one of the best first-poetry-books I’ve ever read. If you think that sounds dramatic, you should probably buy it. 

I first read Thomas’ work in his debut chapbook, Pomeranian (dirt child, 2023), which I carried deliciously in my backpack all the way from treatment at Mass General Hospital to northern England to see my grandfather for the last time. When I travel, especially for sad reasons, I try to pick one book of poetry that I can read over and over as a sort of meditation. Pomeranian was that for me in the final months of last year, and Concerning the Dinner is its greedy equivalent — I’m just glad to have my hands on more pages of Montana. 

This might be an insane thing to write but reading this book gave me the same feeling in my stomach that I got reading Dickens for the first time when I was fourteen. Emphasis on the dick. Somehow Thomas has spun a full collection of moments that feel like postcoital Dadaist snacks (sorta like if the morningslikethese tumblr hashtag was gay). 

Both of Thomas’ recent works have conjured the word menagerie in my mind — animalistic, perfectly excessive, a guarded cup so rich it’s spilling over. The snobbiest part of me thinks of Berghain when I read the addenda of the lavish poetry meal, “there’s also an ice cream machine…” Montana has thought of everything. Even his attention to detail in characters, named and unnamed, posits the word-creatures as orgasmic little organisms themselves. It’s like a fucking zoo in this book! Where the zookeepers are Miss Havisham and the ladies-in-waiting of the Hapsburg Empire. 

Montana’s work feels like a fresh hybrid of fictive poetics. Like if fiction wasn’t lying. It reminds me of a photograph: not completely true, but a perfectly erroneous replica. It reminds me of how Patti Smith describes Mapplethorpe’s visual work in Just Kids: “We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.” Fairy-like. 

Maybe Thomas will be a playwright one day. I can smell these words like a vanitas painting. The objects and foodstuff alive as they would be on a stage. Concerning the Dinner elevates a dirty New York kitchen to the corridors of Versailles. 

Or maybe he’ll just take a bus to Cleveland to hook up. In the words of Thomas himself, “I, being such a good person, have chosen not to be disgusted…”

I have chosen instead to be delighted, and I will be waiting at the Greyhound Station with a standing ovation when Montana gets off that bus.

Concerning the Dinner by Montana James Thomas (Everybody Press, 2024), $26 on Everybody Press.