East End Books Ptown Presents: Stephanie Burt "Super Gay Poems" 6/29 at 6pm.

Stephanie Burt "Super Gay Poems" 6/29 at 6pm. Ptown Bookstore.
East End Books Ptown Presents: Stephanie Burt "Super Gay Poems" 6/29 at 6pm.

Tickets: East End Books Ptown Presents: Stephanie Burt "Super Gay Poems" 6/29 @ 6pm Tickets, Sun, Jun 29, 2025 at 6:00 PM | Eventbrite

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 served 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.

You might’ve seen some buzz about her recent class at Harvard where she’s exploring Taylor Swift through a literary lens—it’s exactly the kind of fascinating, cross-genre thinking she’s known for.


Esteemed scholar, poet, and critic Stephanie Burt anthologizes five decades of verse for and by queer Americans. Interpreted by Burt, the poems of Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, and others trace a flourishing of queer life from Stonewall to today.

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.

You may also like the following events from East End Books Ptown:

• Next month, 26th June, 10:00 pm, Tess Callahan "Dawnland" in Conv. w/ David Hicks "The Gospel According to Danny" in Provincetown, Massachusetts
• Next month, 28th June, 10:00 pm, "Boy With Wings" 6/28 at 6pm - Ptown Bookstore in Provincetown, Massachusetts
• This July, 5th July, 10:00 pm, Christina Clancy "The Snowbirds" 7/5/25 - 6pm - Ptown Bookstore in Provincetown, Massachusetts

Also check out other Arts events in Comstock, Literary Art events in Comstock, Workshops in Comstock.