Cat Fitzpatrick delights in this post-pandemic follow-up to her debut verse novel of present-day manners, The Call-Out-
a trans community celebration of mores, gender theory, and rhyme.
The Dinner Party returns to the chaotic and adorable world of trans femme. The title piece begins… "The 'Rona being now at last abated," and continues with cameo portraits of the seven guests she plans to invite, including:
Together, as we had in days gone by.
I asked Rakshasi, clad in black, so thin,
So eager for some trouble to get in,
Of any kind, and Sophie, blunt and dry,
Who often ended up the night so pissed
She'd trip and fall when climbing up the stairs,
And learned Bridget, sweet, beset by cares,
Who always talks about her therapist ––
My besties. Plus I asked along a pair
Of mascs: Adonis, such a charming youth,
More interested in beauty than in truth
Who drives a motorbike and braids his hair,
And Dominic, less young, but full of poise,
A trickster with a most provoking grin,
More pleased with contradiction than with sin,
And even more with argument than boys,
Joining "The Dinner Party" are several other themed pieces, including "A Stay in the Country," a short arcadian pageant, "Baby Book," about the trials and tribulations of making babies as queer and transsexual couples, "Letter to Crabstick," an epistolatory friendship, and "Uxorious Sonnets," a collection of eight love poems, among them Sonnet 6 in which she writes:
it's almost terrifying when we fuck
how there I am, how in that jostle and shove
of flesh, my thoughts, that mostly run amuck,
contract to simply shouting Love You Love. "Whether she's narrating an Ovidian verse drama, composing a sonnet sequence, or retelling Plato's Symposium in perfectly iambic envelope quatrains, Cat Fitzpatrick is a total genius at making old modes accommodate new realities. I'm so moved by this virtuosic collection of long poems about queer family-making, freaky friendship, erotic love, and gender transition. The Dinner Party is brilliant, hot, uproarious, and gay as hell: at once a high-wire camp performance and an aching tribute to the sounds and shapes of our language."-Maggie Millner, author of Couplets: A Love Story
"Cat Fitzpatrick's The Dinner Party celebrates love, community, domesticity and their manifold humiliations; grieves the loss inherent in love, monitors friend's clashes with the rapt gaze of a connoisseur, airs intimacy's fecal folds, and comes down soundly each time on the side of more: "we must refuse/to not be charmed." How fathom the vasts of the poet's perversity? She rhymes because she likes it. I like it too." -Sophia Dahlin, author of Glove Money CAT FITZPATRICK's debut novel, The Call-Out (Seven Stories Press, 2022), was awarded the 2023 Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction. She is the author of the poetry collection Glamourpuss (Topside Press, 2016), and the co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall Award for Literature. Fitzpatrick is the first trans woman Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University–Newark, and she also serves as the Editrix at LittlePuss Press. The Dinner Party (Seven Stories Press, 2026) is her second novel in verse.
