Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. It asks two questions at the same time: whose desire is understood as dangerously excessive? And—a classic organizer’s question—how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause.
Reviews
[Gabriel] beat everyone to the finish line in the smartest, most roundabout way.
Perverts exemplifies the new poetry’s distinguishing features without being reducible to a narrow patch of typicals. It is queer and leftist, urbane, elegant but bawdy, erudite but steeped in popular culture, and passionately invested in forms of social life that feel distinctly contemporary—the party, the protest—but whose real history is ancient, even primordial
Using the dreams of strangers and friends . . . Kay Gabriel’s epic poem is far from phantasmic. It’s full of specifics about protest, desire, and being trans in our political moment.
Maximally pleasurable . . . [Gabriel] is a poet whose vision for a better life rejects the deranged logic of private property, moral panic, and the hell of autonomy.
Gabriel’s perverts yearn for sex, sex change, and socialist revolution in equal measure. It is a plenary session on acid.
One of poetry’s great dreamers puts nighttime’s revelations into social relation.
A highly social, intertextual theory of the dream, set in an epic form that covers pop culture, futurity, poetics, and sex . . . Throughout Perverts, Gabriel is the coolest person at the party. Her voice feels effortlessly perspicacious, and she has the conviction of a literary star.
Gabriel is masterful . . . delivering a weird and wonderful cast of characters whose attachment to clouds of possibility are geared not towards the pathologisation of the pervert, but toward letting the pervert’s imagination lurch towards a vision of social life designed to meet the needs of all human beings.
Amidst waking nightmares, Gabriel has woken a collage of subconscious desires, both ordinary and depraved, individual and collective, realized and obfuscated—but made necessary and urgent. Desires spilled out onto a page, seen at last.
-Sophia June, King Kong Magazine
Dolls, pills, and intrigue. Delicious!
-Candystore, The Whitney Review
Kay Gabriel collected the dreams of friends and strangers to weave an epic poem about desires subconscious and realized amidst anti-trans panic. Bursting with liberation, and love, it is an urgent and truly satisfying read.
Whip-smart . . . This collection is not only gender non-conforming but also genre non-conforming. Elements of poetry practice are mixed with oral history, non-fiction and prose. Kay Gabriel’s work is boundary-pushing.
There is a propulsion to Gabriel’s lyric, one that interweaves an array of threads to hold together a coherent, singular movement forward, across conversation, thought and community.
