Kay Gabriel hurts me. Or I tried dreaming she would before I wrote this review. Kay Gabriel holding a Werther’s candy and lip synching that song by En Vogue, “Never Gonna Get It.” She was holding my nose up using saran wrap, and it hurt because I didn’t know if it was a joke, or there was something kind of cruel to her intentions. Dreams can be queer like that. And queer is definitely an important word for this book. But “queer” for dreams occupies that between use of the word, like in Little Women, where Jo is often described doing queer things. Or the frequency “queer” shows up in Moby Dick. And maybe there’s some signaling in both these books. I’m reading Little Women to my daughter, and it’s hard not to slip sometimes with Jo’s pronouns, or to wonder what Jo might have preferred in a different world. It’s like watching Rainbow Jack in My Little Pony, and wondering what to do with that rainbow energy. Not that she can’t be she. I like her as she. But I worry whether she’s she because the world wouldn’t give some more options.
I’m trying to demonstrate here what it’s like using the word “queer” when you can only know it as a concept. When, say, Larry Kramer has written a novel about being queer, and you’re reading it from the particular experiential space you’d read anything. To be clear, I’m a reader outside the queer community, and it matters for reading this book. Because there’s a degree and substance of thick togetherness cohering Kay Gabriel with her friends. There’s a joy and gossip and “again” (in that way your friends are always doing that one thing again, and you respond with something between, “Oh, that again.” or “Do that again!”). I’m always excited to see friends in a book of poetry. It’s fun to read and feel included, even as the book is very clear I would be outside the friendship space. It’s like friendship is an activity. Or friendship is magic. And in a book of poems, the friendship implies a social context that’s always messy. Really good friendships are messy. Would the affair in Ariana Reines’s Coeur de Lion be nearly as lurid if she hadn’t named the names? Would Tommy Pico’s pining for Muse in IRL (see micro-REVIEW: IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016)) be nearly as opined without his friends there? Significantly, all the people In Kay Gabriel’s Perverts are queer. It’s a part of the bond, even a messy one. Or that’s what he hear in the Larry Kramer section of the book. There’s a bond in that messiness!
With an elaborate intimacy. The sharing dreams type of intimacy. And by sharing, I mean the poet has asked her friends to submit their dreams for inclusion in her book. Sometimes they’re sexy dreams. Sometimes the sexiness involves stepping right on over a name-your-taboo. Often, though, the dreams have hardly any sexiness. They’re the boring, important-to-the-dreamer mental processing that feels, well, queer. And I would say Gabriel uses the term for its overlappingness between the 2000s usage in “queer community” and whatever Louise May Alcott and Herman Melville are using it for in the 19th Century. Dreams occupy a headspace that possesses the body.
And what I’m really trying to comment on is Gabriel’s choice to share dreams as a “collective capacity.” Maybe this is a bit of a stretch. But Christianity’s insistence that every week believers should literally eat Jesus Christ’s body signifies the overwhelming nature of ritual. We believe together. We think together of the extremity implicit to this signification. And we participate in the ritual with both body and mind. Dreaming is definitely a body and mind activity. I’m not entirely sure if Gabriel and her friends believe they could actually appear as agents in one another’s dreams, as indicated in some of cantos of “Perverts,” but I know that dream life expands the permissibility and scope and reality of subject matter; it gives more latitude to the imagination.
This is the nature of community in Gabriel’s poems. And their shared queerness lets a reader like me see the magic that is part of the bond. People are encouraged to dream, and they’re assured others will listen. It registers a level of acceptance. And this vehicle of the shared dream reservoir, even speculating there may be times when everyone will participate in one another’s dream lives, sets an aura around this process where friends submit their dreams to Kay Gabriel. And she takes on this curious role of scribe. I can’t help thinking of the privileged position William Wordsworth gives the poet. Granted, Wordsworth is focused on the poet’s unique capacity to recognize and articulate and experience the natural landscape using keen and earnest language. Gabriel’s role as the poet is similar, though. As someone who dreams and experiences the naturalness of queer life. She is a conspicuous mediator between dream and language.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.