Some books you meet and forget their names. Some books you meet and recognize their faces. Some books, this book, you meet and know you’ll never encounter another like it again. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s astonishing Boys Behind Glass (Texas Review Press, March 2026) operates by a medieval logic in a digital age; it builds on digressions, demands that we read sideways and backward, and assembles meaning from artwork, fragments, and footnotes.
The collection pairs contemporary sonnets, which Steinorth calls “Little Songs,” with Jenny Walton’s watercolor portraits of men seeking women on the dating app OkCupid. Despite the app’s promise of intimacy, these men have intentionally obscured their profile pictures—hiding behind ski goggles, helmets, or outright replacing a facial photo with their Saint Bernard, grilled cheese, or buttocks in leopard-print underwear. Each colored portrait is followed by a sonnet narrated in third person, tracking a fictional woman’s mind as she considers her prospects. In and of itself, the sonnets coupled with the portraits would make for a satisfying read. But “The Speculum”—the following 70-page section of footnotes, endnotes, cultural archaeology, and associative leaps—elevates the book to another level entirely, reading initially like scholarly apparatus but functioning as something else, too: a second poem, or perhaps the same poem refracted through historical time.
In the opening pages, readers are given an overview of what they can expect from each section, but what follows isn’t clarity; it’s intentionally slippery. Consider, for example, the explanation for the section “The Speculum,” named after that dreaded, always-too-cold gynecological instrument: “Sticky notes & bank notes. Doctor’s notes & whole notes… A murder board. Boogie board. Foot notes & toenails. Cheat codes & ransom notes… A calculus of love notes tucked in a Converse™ shoebox of a Gen X poet w/50 half-smoked candles.” Just as I was wondering why we have this—what kind of apparatus requires this much explanation before I’ve even reached the first poem—the narrator came in with the “Table of Impatience” (Ha! Love “Impatience” instead of “Contents”): “Reader, I see you.” She knows I’m already skeptical, already asking “How do I read this?” Her answer? Eight different ways, from “Begin at the beginning. When you reach the end, stop” to “Stick it under your pillow. Sweet dreams.” She offers a Choose Your Own Adventure™ approach, acknowledging some readers “only eat the muffin tops” while warning in a footnote that “in a king cake, the prize always sinks to the bottom.” This is authorial confidence bordering on friendly confrontation—daring the reader to skip ahead, to rabbit-hole through the index, to abandon linear reading altogether. Even the “Table of Impatience” contains footnotes, one of which suggests: “Can I skip it? Can you kick it?”. Before the first poem, Steinorth has already taught us how to read digressively, how to surrender to the associative sprawl. It’s generous and maddening in equal measure, which is to say: it’s weird, and I’m up for it.
This digressive style reminded me of a medievalist’s lecture I recently caught by accident—slipping into a nearly empty lecture hall, an unplanned digression of my own time. He was talking about the digressions in Beowulf, moments when the poem veers from monster-slaying to recount the Finn episode or the long shadow of the Geatish-Swedish wars. For nineteenth-century readers, these were flaws. But contemporary scholarship sees them as deliberate interlacing: a technique that weaves past, present, and foreshadows doom into a temporal fabric deepening everything we understand about the hero’s story.
As I listened to the lecture, I kept thinking about Steinorth’s book sitting on my desk, how its own digressions operate by a similar logic. It isn’t interruption so much as architecture, not departure but the very method by which meaning gets made. Like Beowulf, the ekphrastic collection Boys Behind Glass operates through interlacing. Each fourteen-line poem is a small meditation on concealment, performance, and the impossibility of knowing another person through curated images.
Before I get too lost in the scholarly apparatus, I must comment on how the first section’s poems crackle with wordplay that’s both humorous and cutting. Even the titles signal this: “OK Buddha,” “OK Astronaut?,” “OK Wounded.” Each “OK” is an affirmation and question, acceptance and skepticism, the way we swipe right while already bracing for disappointment.
In response to one man who wears a Superman shirt for his profile pic, the speaker catalogs everything contained in Superman’s emblematic S in “OK Super”: “S for salivate S for sandwich S / for sanitary S for snake S for swindle / S for sensitive S for sherbet….” The list accelerates from the mundane (sandwich, sherbet) through the heroic (saviors, soaring) to the deflated (spent shell, sag), collapsing the mythology of male invincibility into its component parts: desire, deception, exhaustion. By the end, Superman’s chest emblem becomes a container for every contradictory thing masculinity promises and fails to deliver: “for strongmen to strongarm sacrifice & stipulation / for standoffish for soaring for swollen for shaft / for siren for solo for spent shell for sag”. Steinorth’s puns aren’t ornamental; they’re diagnostic, revealing how language itself performs the same masking and unmasking as the men in the portraits.
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What makes the book ambitious (and “Beowulfian” if you will) is how the next section “The Speculum” digresses from these sonnets and watercolor portraits. Unlike the first section’s third-person narrator, the voice in this section is a self-aware author “a midlife Gen X poet of 50 years, 25 married,” conducting cultural research, making associative leaps, tumbling down the rabbit hole. What’s more, her younger self surfaces through the footnotes as a character named Walkman Girl.
Each poem and beautifully rendered colored portrait from the previous section receives individual annotation in this section. Consider “OK Astronaut?” The poem itself is a meditation on a man in a diving suit or space helmet, the outfit unclear hence the italics and question mark, with the speaker noting her claustrophobia, her inability to be “the guardian of her dearly beloved’s solitude.” “The Speculum” picks up the thread with an etymology of “abyss” (from Hebrew signifiers of bottomless chaos, through Greek and Latin, to modern usage peaking with the Romantics). Then: a note that less than 25% of Earth’s oceans have been mapped with high resolution, while the moon and Mars are fully charted. Then: R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Then: Frank White’s “overview effect” theory. Then: a footnote revealing that the first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, described the experience as “disorienting,” finding Earth small and insignificant, though in official reports he “waxed poetic.” Then: a note on astronaut culture’s intolerance to displays of fear or weakness (“born to ride,” “lie to fly”). Whew!
The effect is Beowulf’s interlacing translated into a postmodern mode: the contemporary moment (a woman swiping through dating apps) becomes inseparable from vast networks of cultural precedent, each encounter on the app a repetition-with-variation of ancient patterns of desire, concealment, performance, and the fraught dynamics of looking and being looked at. Where Beowulf’s digressions create what scholars call “temporal complexity”—placing the hero’s life within cycles of rise and fall that stretch back to Cain and forward to the Geats’ destruction—the section “The Speculum” creates a similar archaeological depth of field.
What emerges is a portrait not just of one masked man, but of masculinity’s relationship to solitude, conquest, emotional suppression, and the performance of heroism across centuries. The digression doesn’t explain the poem. It layers it, complicates it, places the OkCupid astronaut within a tradition of men who’ve donned literal or metaphorical spacesuits to flee intimacy, Earth, or perhaps themselves.
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The longest digression, which I’m hesitant to categorize as a digression, because I view it as integral, concerns José Anibal Macedo, a ballet teacher who sexually abused his students. What’s more, this sexual predator is understood to have assaulted Walkman Girl. This digression spans multiple pages, detailing three trials, two sentencings, the complicity of other victims’ parents who refused to believe their daughters and the wife who stayed. The passage is searing: “What does it mean that for injustice to be met with justice, the private must be made public? / I mean. In the body. What does it mean?”
The effect of this reveal is that it haunts the entire collection. Every masked man in the poems becomes potentially this: someone performing innocence, making his body a locked room, demanding trust while refusing to show his face. The ballet studio and the dating app collapse into each other: both spaces where people must navigate performance, where they must decode what’s hidden, where harm hides behind charm and “match percentages.” Within this context, OkCupid’s little-known “Enemy” feature, which assigns a percentage score measuring how incompatible two users are, meant to “encourage oppositional attraction,” takes on the full ferocity of its root meaning: enemy not as romantic spark but as genuine threat, a warning system for survival.
Just as Beowulf’s digressions cast shadows forward and backward across the narrative, the darker passages here make it impossible to read the poems as merely playful or ironic. The pervasive sense of loneliness becomes not individual but epidemic, not personal but structural. After all, the U.S. Surgeon General recently declared loneliness a public health crisis, warning that roughly half of American adults experience measurable loneliness, with health risks as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. One wonders whether some of this loneliness is chosen—men retreating behind masks and screens and perceived grievance, hiding from a world they’ve decided is hostile to them, while women on the other side of the glass learn to read what’s concealed, to decode the difference between shyness and danger. In an era of organized rage, isolation has become ideology. Perhaps even self-preservation. But I digress.
This outstanding collection suggests that contemporary poetry, like medieval epic, might need digressions—not as interruption but as structure, not as departure but as arrival at a deeper understanding of how our moment fits (or fails to fit) within the patterns that precede it. Boys Behind Glass understands that a contemporary poem about loneliness can’t be contained in fourteen lines when the loneliness itself is a product of compounded time—coded into our algorithms yet inherited from every masked hero and concealed wound that came before.
