Overview

Boys Behind Glass is a cheeky documentary of contemporary masculinity through the lens of matchmaking, pop culture, scientific “progress” and female gaze. This third collection from Jennifer Sperry Steinorth continues a trajectory of genre-bending poetry, this time in collaboration with artist Jenny Walton, whose documentary series Match/Enemy creates a visual algorithm of her experience on OKCupid and explores how men-seeking-women represent themselves via anonymity. In the first half of the book, watercolor portraits of single men are paired with irreverent “sonnets” gazing into the mind of a fictional woman looking at the men, looking for love. The second half is a maximalist kaleidoscope, masquerading as elaborate end notes, a diagnostic of loneliness through a wiki-esque labyrinth of technology and iconography. The culmination is a carousal of sex, selfies, heroes, and techies, what we long for & the many ways we hide.

Full Product Details

9781680034424

Table of Contents

Reviews

Boys Behind Glass is a mind-blowing experiment in form and lyric. Any of the book's elements would be compelling on their own: Jenny Walton's subtly sympathetic watercolor portraits of men on an online dating service; Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's playful, incisive, rueful poems in response to these examples of the male self-gaze; and Steinorth's ingenious sequence of asterisks-within-footnotes-within-glosses that provides an almost novelistic excavation of both a poetic persona and a culture. Altogether the reader's experience is prismatic and mosaical as poet and painter investigate with word and image our fear of being seen and our need to be loved. --Dan O'Brien, author of Our Cancers and Survivor's Notebook --Dan O'Brien Boys Behind Glass is an amazing project: ingenious, droll, dark, generous, fascinating, feminist in a way that understands the assignment--that is, to assume power rather than resent its lack, a female gaze on the male gaze, with all the complications that involves. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's poems and Jenny Walton's paintings nod to tradition while disrupting those traditions, and bring new news about the intimacies and distances between men and women, all while being good, serious fun. --Daisy Fried, author of The Year the City Emptied and Women's Poetry: Poetry & Advice --Daisy Fried Boys Behind Glass opens a door hidden behind a mirror--and I fell straight through. Part lookbook, part feminist archive, this weird, wise, dazzling, and genre-defying collaboration flips the historically male academic gaze inside out. In conversation with Jenny Walton's haunting watercolor portrait series, ""Match/Enemy,"" Jennifer Sperry Steinorth sifts through fragmented narratives to uncover the complexities of testimony, embodied trauma, justice, and complicity. Where silence and spectacle have long shielded power, this book holds its provocative glare. Ok, Archaic Torso of Apollo--I see you. --Jenny Molberg, author of The Court of No Record and Refusal --Jenny Molberg ""Here's the dirt the heart wants the pain it knows"" writes Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, in a poem paired with Jenny Walton's painting of a dating profile photo: a man on his knees, his face hidden while sponge-scrubbing the floor. There are so many intricate, reflective layers to wonder and worry about in Boys Behind Glass. Steinorth and Walton craft a brilliant book form that invites us to consider carefully the thrall and trepidation of potential love, lust, loss, lies--when we try to see masculinities, what do we really see and how might we feel if we're caught watching? In these poems, the veil between humorous and serious is as slight as a camera's lens. Impressive range and incisive specificity mark this book's bespoke ekphrastic conversation and wily relationship to notation. The personal and political stakes stay high in this ""survey of suitors"" that questions and footnotes: what is the body, what is the suit, how and why do we wear what we wear, and what are each of us suited to put on--or take off? We do doubletakes at Dante, Darwin, the original Walkman(TM), and Superman as we consider the violence and mess of masculinities. I'm haunted and enhanced by the many rabbit holes this book looks down. Yes, there are multitudes, but what about that knotty tension between pairs and doubles? ""Forget/what you think you know about double exposure,"" but be careful: ""every pairing is a beginning . . ."" --Aaron Coleman, author of Red Wilderness, translator of Nicolás Guillén's The Great Zoo --Aaron Coleman Ekphrasis strives to deepen representation, but in Jen ​Sperry Steinorth's hands it becomes a way of excavating the obfuscation of identity by both viewer and viewee. As commodified objects, we tend to accept the transactional rules that govern the salvos of intimacy, the earliest movement of which is the gaze. In contrast, the pairing of Jenny Walton's watercolor portraits with Steinorth's sonnet-songs and cheval mirror ""end notes"" tilt our point of observation until we are finally allowed to move beyond the question of ""if there were a face to face / would it turn away?"" The answer is an exploration of intimacy as antidote to performance, all by way of a set of poems that converse, play, startle, and dazzle with their ability to truly see. --Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Great Lovers and All It's Charms --Keetje Kuipers In Boys Behind Glass, Jenifer Sperry Steinorth's poetry and Jenny Walton's paintings entwine to explore the fractured terrain of modern intimacy. Throughout these poems, Steinorth delves into modern romance with a magnifying glass, digging deep to hold up portraits of loneliness and to offer glimpses of the inner lives of men in dating apps, often men with concealed faces, half-faced, faceless. ""The problem w/ love is it's // never known better,"" Steinorth writes, and it is this problem that Steinorth confronts so brilliantly, blurring the line between watching and being watched, between performative text and informative text. Via endnotes, which are open windows for us to see the poems' blood and marrow, Steinorth creates a secondary voice that adds dimension to the poetic text and the visual text, intensifying our understanding of the contradictions of desire and connection in a digital age. --Octavio Quintanilla, Texas Poet Laureate and author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows and Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours --Octavio Quintanilla Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's new collection, Boys Behind Glass, achieves the type of transcendence one hopes for in ekphrastic work. Featuring watercolors of OkCupid profile pictures with re-imagined sonnets, the collection weaves art and text to highlight the myriad ways we conceal and reveal ourselves in self-presentation. Through plucky language play and an eye for the absurd, this collection insightfully explores masculinity, hero worship, and intimacy in the age of porn. What's more the wit within the collection serves as a powerful counterpoint to our epoch's epidemic of loneliness. For example, in what appears to be a scientific works-cited page, there includes a partial list of internet rabbit holes such as Alvin and the Chipmunks and Guns N' Roses. Boys Behind Glass is truly a tour de force! --Charlotte Pence, author of Code and Many Small Fires --Charlotte Pence Part exhibition, part poetry collection, part scholarly writing, but also, so much more, Boys Behind Glass left me exhilarated by the possibility and power of ekphrasis, portraiture, and experimentation. The double gaze of Walton and Steinorth throws us down a kaleidoscopic rabbit hole of headless torsos, glasses, disembodied eyes, cro​tches and burning cards. In this world (which is very much our world) created from OkCupid profile pictures, we experience shamelessness and shame, anonymity and intimacy, the whimsical and the terrifying. Novel, complex and brilliant, this book reclaims the reigns of what is pushed to us by algorithms and patriarchy, and gives us a rich dimensional whole from its impressive parts. --Ananda Lima, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/Land --Ananda Lima ""Boys Behind Glass opens a door hidden behind a mirror--and I fell straight through. Part lookbook, part feminist archive, this weird, wise, dazzling, and genre-defying collaboration flips the historically male academic gaze inside out. In conversation with Jenny Walton's haunting watercolor portrait series, 'Match/Enemy, ' Jennifer Sperry Steinorth sifts through fragmented narratives to uncover the complexities of testimony, embodied trauma, justice, and complicity. Where silence and spectacle have long shielded power, this book holds its provocative glare. Ok, Archaic Torso of Apollo--I see you."" --Jenny Molberg, author of The Court of No Record and Refusal--Jenny Molberg

""Boys Behind Glass is a mind-blowing experiment in form and lyric. Any of the book's elements would be compelling on their own: Jenny Walton's subtly sympathetic watercolor portraits of men on an online dating service; Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's playful, incisive, rueful poems in response to these examples of the male self-gaze; and Steinorth's ingenious sequence of asterisks-within-footnotes-within-glosses that provides an almost novelistic excavation of both a poetic persona and a culture. Altogether the reader's experience is prismatic and mosaical as poet and painter investigate with word and image our fear of being seen and our need to be loved."" --Dan O'Brien, author of Our Cancers and Survivor's Notebook--Dan O'Brien ""Boys Behind Glass is an amazing project: ingenious, droll, dark, generous, fascinating, feminist in a way that understands the assignment--that is, to assume power rather than resent its lack, a female gaze on the male gaze, with all the complications that involves. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's poems and Jenny Walton's paintings nod to tradition while disrupting those traditions, and bring new news about the intimacies and distances between men and women, all while being good, serious fun."" --Daisy Fried, author of The Year the City Emptied and Women's Poetry: Poetry & Advice--Daisy Fried ""Boys Behind Glass opens a door hidden behind a mirror--and I fell straight through. Part lookbook, part feminist archive, this weird, wise, dazzling, and genre-defying collaboration flips the historically male academic gaze inside out. In conversation with Jenny Walton's haunting watercolor portrait series, 'Match/Enemy, ' Jennifer Sperry Steinorth sifts through fragmented narratives to uncover the complexities of testimony, embodied trauma, justice, and complicity. Where silence and spectacle have long shielded power, this book holds its provocative glare. Ok, Archaic Torso of Apollo--I see you."" --Jenny Molberg, author of The Court of No Record and Refusal--Jenny Molberg ""'Here's the dirt the heart wants the pain it knows' writes Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, in a poem paired with Jenny Walton's painting of a dating profile photo: a man on his knees, his face hidden while sponge-scrubbing the floor. There are so many intricate, reflective layers to wonder and worry about in Boys Behind Glass. Steinorth and Walton craft a brilliant book form that invites us to consider carefully the thrall and trepidation of potential love, lust, loss, lies--when we try to see masculinities, what do we really see and how might we feel if we're caught watching? In these poems, the veil between humorous and serious is as slight as a camera's lens. Impressive range and incisive specificity mark this book's bespoke ekphrastic conversation and wily relationship to notation. The personal and political stakes stay high in this 'survey of suitors' that questions and footnotes: what is the body, what is the suit, how and why do we wear what we wear, and what are each of us suited to put on--or take off? We do doubletakes at Dante, Darwin, the original Walkman(TM), and Superman as we consider the violence and mess of masculinities. I'm haunted and enhanced by the many rabbit holes this book looks down. Yes, there are multitudes, but what about that knotty tension between pairs and doubles? 'Forget/what you think you know about double exposure, ' but be careful: 'every pairing is a beginning . . .'"" --Aaron Coleman, author of Red Wilderness, translator of Nicolás Guillén's The Great Zoo--Aaron Coleman

Author Information

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Boys Behind Glass, A Wake with Nine Shades, and Her Read, A Graphic Poem, recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Fred Whitehead Award and a Foreword Reviews Bronze Prize in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared at The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, and TriQuarterly. She has been awarded grants & fellowships from the University of Michigan, Yale, Vermont Studio Center, Community of Writers and elsewhere. She lectures at the University of Michigan and is at work on a biography of C.D. Wright. Washington D.C. artist Jenny Walton holds an MFA from American University. Her work has been critically reviewed and shown in New York, Miami, Boston, Seattle and Italy. Her awards include grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available