Super Gay Poems
LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall
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A major poet and literary critic leads an aesthetic adventure through poems about queer experience, by writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans, nonbinary, gender fluid, and more.
A groundbreaking anthology edited by acclaimed poet, critic, and scholar Stephanie Burt, Super Gay Poems brings together fifty-one works encompassing the wide range of queer and trans verse after the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Since that galvanizing moment, poetry has served as both a vehicle for queer liberation and a witness to its sometimes fragile, sometimes ebullient flourishing, across the world.
The poems in this anthology represent the great variety of queer and trans life itself. They include near-sonnets, iambic couplets, and rhymed quatrains; skinny dimeters and shaped poems; chatty free verse and intentionally inaccurate translations; the demotic and the rococo. Arranged in chronological order, the selections trace queer culture's recent evolutions. Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, essa ranapiri, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise--poets widely known and poets who deserve to be--share their alienation, their euphoria, and their encounters with a protean community as it discovers new solidarities and new selves.
Each piece is paired with a concise, eye-opening essay in Burt's trademark style, with verve and an inimitable literary ear. A treasury of aesthetic experience and insight, Super Gay Poems points protestors, political organizers, poetry lovers, and LGBTQIA+ readers toward many beautiful tomorrows.
About this Author
Stephanie Burt is the author of fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including Super Gay Poems and Don't Read Poetry. A past judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she served as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Raritan, and other publications. She is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.
Reviews
Like many readers, I suspect, I have often found myself wondering whether overly obtuse or encoded poems are worth the effort. 'Just try' might be the operating mantra of this collection. Just try to understand what the poet is saying, Burt urges. Reading her essays is like sitting in class with your favorite English professor: Resistance is futile. Just try to dislike or dismiss the poems that she has chosen to investigate.
This deft and thoughtful anthology of poems about queerness is a strong addition to any library collection.
Well selected and compulsively readable...Burt's insightful commentary draws throughlines between eras and poets, making this a valuable text for the classroom and a dynamic and comprehensive collection for casual readers of contemporary poetry.
What a gift, this book, one I wish I had in my personal library and in my super gay life much earlier. Stephanie Burt is a vital thinker, offering witty, fun, aesthetically perceptive, and politically astute reflections on the work of an astonishing range of poets.
Stephanie Burt has woven a raucous rainbow flag from our contributions--the contributions of fags, dykes, enbys, trans folk, and queers--to poetry in the past four decades. This essential book needs to be on every poetry reading list and on every queer studies syllabus.
Stephanie Burt has given us not just a guide to queer poetry but a new way of thinking about beauty, passion, and the passage of time. Absolutely indispensable.
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