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.

"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

Publisher: Nightboat Books

Pub date: 2025-09-30

Length: 96 pages