Super Gay Poems

LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall

Stephanie Burt

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674299726
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2025 New England Book Award for Poetry

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Homosexuality (1954 / 1970)
• Carol, in the park, chewing on straws (1970)
• We Are Leaves (1972)
• Twenty-One Love Poems, XIII (1976)
• Manos Karastefanis (1976)
• Walking Our Boundaries (1978)
• Bally Power Play (1979 / 1982)
• The First Time (1982)
• Nights of 1962: The River Merchant’s Wife (1986 / 1990)
• The Worrying (1988)
• 7301 (1987)
• Mummy and Donor and Deirdre (1991)
• Object Lessons (1992)
• Mermaid (1994)
• Suits and Ties (1994)
• The Falling Sky (1992 / 1995)
• Jump Back in Me Now (1995)
• The Underwriters (2000)
• In the South That Winter (2001)
• Notes toward Dropping out (2002)
• looking out now aftr a recent brek up (2005)
• Found in Diary Dated May 29, 1973 (2000 / 2003)
• Riding Westward (2006)
• The Broken (I) (2007)
• Takeoff (2007)
• Apparition (2008)
• What the Future Has in Store (2009)
• Evocation (2009)
• Glass Orgasm (2009)
• Deidre (2010)
• Lessons in Woodworking (2012)
• Queer (2012)
• Unknown Duration of Fear / A Human Being Realizes They Are Alone for the First Time in 12 Hours (2014)
• Heart Condition (2014)
• The First of Never (2015)
• Bisexuality (2016)
• Cancer, Leo Rising (2016)
• The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep (2016 / 2024)
• After Catullus 5 (2016 / 2018)
• Dis Pure Diss (2017)
• Sexual History (2017)
• She Ties My Bow Tie (2017)
• You Throw a Party and Everyone You Have Ever Been Attracted To Is There (2019)
• Prayer of the Slut (2020)
• la cortadura / the cut (2021)
• Indo-Queer I (2021)
• Poly Beach House (2022)
• Waiting for You to Die So I Can Be Myself (2022)
• She-Viper with Tales Outstretched (2022)
• Summer (2023)
• So Your GF Wants to Come Out as Bi and Polyamorous to Her Very Conservative Family (2024)
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index