Presented by Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology
Boys Behind Glass: A GenX Poetry Play & Launch Party
From 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Tickets from $17.85
Celebrate the launch of Jen Sperry Steinorth's latest book, “Boys Behind Glass,” with a GenX poetry play and launch party.
“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 endnotes, a diagnostic of loneliness through a wiki-esque labyrinth of technology and iconography. The culmination is a carousel of sex, selfies, heroes, and techies, what we long for & the many ways we hide.
A portion of the proceeds benefits the Women's Resource Center.
This event will contain mature themes.
JENNIFER SPERRY STEINORTH
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Boys Behind Glass (2026), A Wake with Nine Shades, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Prize, & Her Read, A Graphic Poem, recipient of the Foreword Reviews Bronze Prize for Poetry & the Fred Whitehead Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. A poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist & licensed builder, she has received grants from Yale, Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers & the Institute for Research on Women & Gender at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she lectures in the English Department. She is at work on a biography of American poet C.D. Wright.
Steinorth began her artistic life as a dancer, practicing and performing with the Houston Ballet, the School of the Pennsylvania Ballet, and Interlochen Arts Academy. For 15 years, she was president and lead designer for a design-build construction company specializing in environmentally-responsible homes; their architectural work has been featured in Fine Homebuilding and other national journals. Their visual art has appeared at the Dennos Museum, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and elsewhere. She divides her time between Ann Arbor, Traverse City, Michigan, and wherever else the winds carry her. She moonlights as an architectural designer and building consultant when the light falls just so.
