Talk

BFA Visual & Critical Studies and the Honors Program present poet and professor Kay Gabriel to speak about and read from her new book, A Queen in Bucks County. Gabriel’s book is an epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor that, as one reviewer puts it, “finds a connection between trans femininity and modernism.” In A Queen in Bucks County, the protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men “buy him things,” lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out. Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. She’s the author of Kissing Other People or the House of Fame and A Queen in Bucks County.