Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall

by Stephanie Burt

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674273115
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	47,285
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the 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 serves 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.

Editorial Reviews

03/17/2025

In this well selected and compulsively readable anthology, Harvard English professor Burt (We Are Mermaids) presents 51 poems that address and exemplify queerness in America. In the introduction, Burt explains that she chose to only include poems published post-1969, establishing the year of the Stonewall riots as the inception of modern queer identity. She additionally provides helpful context for each poem in an accompanying essay. The anthology moves chronologically, beginning with Frank O’Hara’s “Homosexuality,” which addresses closeted life in its opening line, “So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping/ our mouths shut.” From the 1990s to the 2000s, the anthology introduces an increasing number of poets of trans and other gender identities, including the glorious ode to genderqueer sex “Suits and Ties” by Samuel Ace. Danez Smith’s 2022 poem “Waiting for You to Die So I Can Be Myself” picks up where O’Hara left off, articulating the strain of hiding one’s true self: “i want to say something without saying it/ but there’s no time. i’m waiting for a few folks/ i love dearly to die so i can be myself.” Burt’s insightful commentary draws through lines between eras and poets, making this a valuable text for the classroom and a dynamic and comprehensive collection for casual readers of contemporary poetry. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Charlie Jane Anders

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.

Rajiv Mohabir

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.

Gay and Lesbian Review - Dale Boyer

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.

Chen Chen

03/01/2025

Burt (English, Harvard Univ.; Don't Read Poetry) provides significant history and insight into queer poetics in this anthology, which not only offers her thoughts about and analysis of the included poems (by poets such as Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Danez Smith), but also includes brief biographies of each of the authors and explains how earlier poets may have influenced the ones who came after them. Surveying both time and content, Burt explains poetry mechanics and how LGBTQIA+ history has changed, or in some cases, stayed the same over time. In her commentary on Paul Monette's poem "The Worrying," Burt points out the similarities and differences between the HIV/AIDs epidemic and the COVID pandemic, writing: "But in the years when Monette wrote Love Alone, these kinds of worries might have seemed beyond comprehension for heterosexual, nondisabled readers: readers who thought they were safe." VERDICT This deft and thoughtful anthology of poems about queerness is a strong addition to any library collection.—Autumn West

Library Journal