Perverts

Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She’s the author of Perverts (2025), Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (2023), and A Queen in Bucks County (2022), all from Nightboat. She’s the Editorial Director at the Poetry Project and lives in New York City.

"[Perverts] 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 . . . . This is as good as it gets."—Anahid Neressian, Bookforum"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."—Emma Alpern, New York Magazine"[Gabriel] beat everyone to the finish line in the smartest, most roundabout way."—Hari Nef, Interview"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."—Shiv Kotecha, BOMB“Kay Gabriel has written an anti-epic for our current moment, bringing contemporary queer community into being with lyric verve amid and in resistance to our ongoing catastrophe.”—John Keene“Perverts is a gorgeous multicolored quilt of the subconscious of others, a pleasure, a riot . . . a gift.”—Hannah Black"One of poetry’s great dreamers puts nighttime’s revelations into social relation."—Rainer Diana Hamilton, Frieze"Gabriel's perverts yearn for sex, sex change, and socialist revolution in equal measure. It is a plenary session on acid . . . Gabriel's tear encompasses decades of hoped-for social and political change."—Ben Miller, The Baffler"Dolls, pills, and intrigue. Delicious"—Candystore, The Whitney Review"In Gabriel's hands, history is still up for grabs."—Morgan Bassichis"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."—Eliot Duncan, Kismet Magazine