A rollicking, polyphonic GenX poetry-play by Jen Sperry Steinorth to celebrate the release of Boys Behind Glass: a cheeky documentary of contemporary masculinity through the lens of matchmaking, hero-worship, scientific “progress” & the female gaze.

Doors open at 6:30 for conversation, drinks, snacks & optional speed dating.

Performance from 7-7:50, followed by Q&A, book-signing & thirsty mingling.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Boys Behind Glass, A Wake with Nine Shades, & Her Read, A Graphic Poem, recipient of the Ted Whitehead Award & a Foreword Reviews prize for poetry. An award-winning poet, scholar, essayist & licensed builder, she lectures at the University of Michigan, spins the O is for Octopus substack, & is the biographer of C.D. Wright. She lives in Traverse City.

Presented in honor of both National Poetry Month & Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

A portion of proceeds benefits the Women's Resource Center.

This event will contain mature themes.

Advance praise for Boys Behind Glass:

“Through plucky language play and an eye for the absurd, this collection explores masculinity, hero worship, and intimacy in the age of porn...a powerful counterpoint to our epoch’s epidemic of loneliness. Boys Behind Glass is truly a tour de force!”

—Charlotte Pence

“Part lookbook, part feminist archive, this weird, wise, dazzling, and genre-defying collaboration flips the historically male academic gaze inside out.... Where silence and spectacle have long shielded power, this book holds its provocative glare.”
—Jenny Molberg

“Boys Behind Glass is a mind-blowing experiment in form and lyric...an almost novelistic excavation of both a poetic persona and a culture...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