SUPER GAY POEMS: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall
Edited by Stephanie Burt
Belknap Press (Harvard Univ. Press). 368 pages, $29.95
ARCHIVE OF STYLE: New and Selected Poems
by Cheryl Clarke
TriQuarterly (Northwestern Univ. Press). 192 pages, $29.
STEPHANIE BURT, a professor of English at Harvard, has assembled a somewhat idiosyncratic collection of poems designed to represent a cross-section of LGBT poetry written since Stonewall. As a transwoman herself, she remarks that this is “the book I wish I could have seen when I was a baby trans, trying to figure out whether—if ever—I could come out myself.” The downside of this approach is that after a fashion the poems can begin to feel somewhat narrowly focused and repetitive. Nevertheless, the presence of so many previously unknown—especially trans—voices is welcome.
Dale Boyer’s most recent work is Columbus in the New World: Selected Poems.
