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.
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.
"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 Nicolas Guillen's The Great Zoo--Aaron Coleman
