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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Book cover for The Dinner Party
Book cover for The Dinner Party

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 returns to the chaotic and adorable world of the trans femme with The Dinner Party, a jubilant celebration of queerness and a tender ode to how communities are formed through fostering support, joy, and love.

In the title piece, a riotous post-pandemic dinner party inspires musings on love and gender. Then there is “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 epistolary friendship; and “Uxorious Sonnets,” a collection of eight love poems.

Book cover for The Dinner Party
Book cover for The Dinner Party

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“"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.”

“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.”

Cat Fitzpatrick

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.