Super Gay Poems

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 evolutions 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.

Stephanie Burt is the author of fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including Don’t Read Poetry and The Poem Is You. 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, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Raritan, and other publications. She is the Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.