Perverts

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.

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.

Dolls, pills, and intrigue. Delicious!

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.