Books

Spiked and sparkling by turns, Turner and Kay turn keys, rev.
‍— Jackie Ess

For the desirous, it’s better when one has options rather than reasons. No one knows this better than Turner, the self-professed “Epistoslut” of Kay Gabriel’s dazzling A Queen in Bucks County. His penchant for the amorous exchange—brought into the mouth by the hand and disbursed into the world again as letters, and poems, and commands, and suggestions, questions, dares, and fantasies—makes for what one wants, regardless: poems that sharpen the unquenchable desires we have right now into a “sluice of vision” for the future. Kay Gabriel’s writing makes radical altruism seem possible. No tiny cock doesn’t get to also be a karaoke mic covered in the slobber of one or more of her close friends. No letter gets addressed without the surfeit of need to be written back sounded loud and clear. One of the many pleasures in reading Kay Gabriel’s writing is to feel like it was written expressly for me, but also for everyone I love.
‍— Shiv Kotecha

What if Elsa Triolet had forbidden her suitor to write her, not about love, but about being trans? What if whorishness and camp were uncanny for celebrity? for commodity? for New Jersey? Oh wait… I loved reading Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Bucks County because it is a committedly horny book, an epistolary roman à clef, in sometimes verse, a pornotract blowing up (or blowing off) the parallel trajectories of identitarian capture and belle lettrist tokenization laid out for queer and trans writers and writing under the sign of literature. Like its protagonist, Turner, it is also a hot mess of the best sort, lolling about and luxuriating in the fruits of the hustle, hungry for the next, marinating in and musing on friendship, ruins, The Valley of the Dolls, Jack Spicer, and gossiping with Gabriel’s loves about what distracts, amuses or revolts, or could.
— Trish Salah

Kay Gabriel inherited Bernadette Mayer and Geoffrey Chaucer’s dreams. For this, I could denounce her, as Gabriel herself denounces friend and poet Stephen Ira in this book’s “Blind Item” (in exchange for his 78 cents). Instead, I accept her generosity, which offers a year’s worth of visions—between the Aprils of 2019 and 2020—rather than a single December day. She’ll tell you that her Personism is for the less fabulous, but it’s simply more collective: even sleep is a social matter, sending her to protests and parties and picket lines and visiting fellowships, demanding complicated schematics of love and its construction by meals. We get the chaise without the bother of an analyst. Minding our resistance, we ingest our theory as prescribed, but it’s okay because “‘sublate’ is a little gay.” This is no record of imaginary teeth with real fears; in dreams she drives capably. I’ve ended love and rearranged my days on the strength of advice Kay’s given me in my sleep, though I’m modern enough to know that dreams define their recipients, not the gods who deign to offer them to poets. Kierkegaard says city life made us lose faith in the dream as a source of divine will, but Kay takes God’s place. When her dream sorts us all into rooms marked kissing and not kissing, you’ll want to be on the right side.
‍— Rainer Diana Hamilton