Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry After Stonewall

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.”