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A Queen in Bucks County
An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.
In A Queen in Bucks County, our 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.
In A Queen in Bucks County, our 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.
80 pages, Paperback
First published November 8, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
November 7, 2022
This is a gloriously queer work from Kay Gabriel, erudite and yet grounded in the speech queer folks use with each other away from prying eyes. Interspersed with verses, we have poetry in the form of letters - missives from Gabriel's twink alter ego, Turner, to friends and lovers. An outsider might remark upon the intertwining of the sacred and profane, but in reality both elements have been so woven into our daily lives and speech that it is unremarkable here. Instead, what is remarkable is the way Gabriel captures the poetry embedded in every day moments and encounters. It is a way of viewing our daily lives as awash with the poetic. There may be layers to unravel with a trans poet using a seemingly cis gay man as an alter ego, but for my enjoyment it did not matter. Having recently read other volumes of more experimental verses, it was refreshing to read a work that was more experimental in substance rather than form.
June 15, 2023
really fun book, but of course the regional trans poetry book had two (2) poems addressed to the twink my ex was fucking before me — the world is [] this big
January 21, 2023
A Queen? In Bucks County??
February 23, 2025
I don't think I am smart enough for this, perhaps? It feels like some sort of trans cultural touchstone, but I could not understand it. Maybe I will reread it. Also there aren't toilets on regional rail.
December 24, 2022
Smutty, epistolary, and, dare I say… tender, almost, in a way? Lewd, yet definitely not indelicate. I do consider this a queer contemporary work of art.
If Jack Spicer, Richard Siken, and Frank O’Hara had a baby, it would be this book. Except, you know, much more vulgar.
If Jack Spicer, Richard Siken, and Frank O’Hara had a baby, it would be this book. Except, you know, much more vulgar.
December 25, 2025
I may not write in, nor particularly enjoy this genre, yet it seems to be a genre through which I auto egoize, under strain, my existence. Why is everything a projection project? It amuses the seat of conciousnes, I guess. Atleast I get to graft a self onto a work I can only desribe as sublime.
Something special is cooking in Buck's County... A dialogue was palatably struck among the varied boners this work demanded; each rise and fall orchestrated, no accidents, only worldplay and biology. Blush,
Horned-Ang(r)(st)y-Detherapized-GradStud(ed)(ented).
Something special is cooking in Buck's County... A dialogue was palatably struck among the varied boners this work demanded; each rise and fall orchestrated, no accidents, only worldplay and biology. Blush,
Horned-Ang(r)(st)y-Detherapized-GradStud(ed)(ented).
December 4, 2025
Really great writing. At times so horny I got shy…
February 28, 2023
This book is a wild, wild ride. I am sufficiently scandalized and delighted.
June 9, 2024
Gritty gritty gay
June 19, 2024
This was as sexy as it was confusing.
———————————————————————————
“I’m in love with the future tense only, and keep it on a high shelf or hanging from my rearview mirror. I swear it’ll take down the highway too, and whatever’s left will be for the rest of us.”
“What’s the lesson? Stephen I sometimes get the sense that white queers crave distinction; the monster thing, like Jackie says, the drapery of a special coat without anything to invite the concerted attention of a cop. Then it gets real: do you choke? As for distinction, there are real villains and we know them by their zip codes, their uniforms, or their fancy fucking backpacks.”
“I tried to impress, thought I ended up a disappointment but really I was probably just young and empty.”
“I have fantasies that this intense friendship of ours will culminate in a home—have we written ourselves into a sitcom? There won’t be any dying young and we’ll have time for writing or to do whatever, masturbate, mutual childcare (will there be children?), time at the beach, no more Januaries. I got this image from somebody else, does it matter?”
“My imaginative lusts riddle bullet holes in the side of the achievable. Have you ever wanted to get fucked by an abdomen, an armpit, a couple of peddling legs?”
“So what if I want to be embarrassed? Usually I feel like telling anybody your dreams feels like showing your ass to strangers, well, so what if they look at what’s good for them.”
———————————————————————————
“I’m in love with the future tense only, and keep it on a high shelf or hanging from my rearview mirror. I swear it’ll take down the highway too, and whatever’s left will be for the rest of us.”
“What’s the lesson? Stephen I sometimes get the sense that white queers crave distinction; the monster thing, like Jackie says, the drapery of a special coat without anything to invite the concerted attention of a cop. Then it gets real: do you choke? As for distinction, there are real villains and we know them by their zip codes, their uniforms, or their fancy fucking backpacks.”
“I tried to impress, thought I ended up a disappointment but really I was probably just young and empty.”
“I have fantasies that this intense friendship of ours will culminate in a home—have we written ourselves into a sitcom? There won’t be any dying young and we’ll have time for writing or to do whatever, masturbate, mutual childcare (will there be children?), time at the beach, no more Januaries. I got this image from somebody else, does it matter?”
“My imaginative lusts riddle bullet holes in the side of the achievable. Have you ever wanted to get fucked by an abdomen, an armpit, a couple of peddling legs?”
“So what if I want to be embarrassed? Usually I feel like telling anybody your dreams feels like showing your ass to strangers, well, so what if they look at what’s good for them.”
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January 16, 2025this was very fun to read in public. delicious inventive
December 9, 2022
I'll start with some disagreements. Then I will be nice. Kay confesses she does her best to cheat; I do my best to maintain fidelity. She likes the poetics of the suture, which in my book makes her a discursive idealist. I would prefer to think of desire in terms of the materiality of the letter, rather than its purloining.
She asks the reader to forgive these poems their texture. I do. She writes not in consolation but to avenge a shared grievance. Same. She writes a funny dialogue between Mr. Capital and Ms. Earth, seated on a stool; Ms. Earth turns out to resemble Jessica Rabbit. It made me laugh. The best part of the book is a questionnaire she asks us to fill out. It was a fun and educational exercise. Throughout, Kay has a great vulgar sense of humor, refusing all forms of shame and proudly discussing the ugly sides of the trans experience. In a memorable image she describes the insistence of a cat chasing a synthetic mouse tied to a wand; story of my life.
She asks the reader to forgive these poems their texture. I do. She writes not in consolation but to avenge a shared grievance. Same. She writes a funny dialogue between Mr. Capital and Ms. Earth, seated on a stool; Ms. Earth turns out to resemble Jessica Rabbit. It made me laugh. The best part of the book is a questionnaire she asks us to fill out. It was a fun and educational exercise. Throughout, Kay has a great vulgar sense of humor, refusing all forms of shame and proudly discussing the ugly sides of the trans experience. In a memorable image she describes the insistence of a cat chasing a synthetic mouse tied to a wand; story of my life.
May 5, 2023
Kay keeps it raw and real. Picked this up at the library as I'm trying to read more poetry again and appreciated the different style that is an epistolary series and serial poem and was just taken on a journey reading Turner's journey. Since Kay is using his point of view to let us know about different sexual experiences and thoughts and while I'm realizing as an ace person, there are some passages that are uncomfy to read when writers write about sex. But that's the reading experience, I like to learn about experiences different than mine and that's what reading is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes. Taking the time to understand the many different realities that exist.
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April 21, 2023“the leisure you need to have sex, well, the leisure you need to write. it’s leisure and everyone should have it; when everybody does, it won’t be leisure anymore, but something else, like and also totally unlike a bed to sleep in.”
December 27, 2022
some of it is really nice and has fun f@ggy voice, but idk... for ME... being obtusely sincere and unreferential is my "in" for 2023. and this was not necessarily that.
March 12, 2023
Delightful and thoughtful.
June 7, 2025
Be careful reading Kay Gabriel’s book. Especially if you’re a man, because you’re probably used to hearing how most men think with their dick. And this Turner in Gabriel’s book is definitely thinking with his dick. And he’s thinking with his wallet. And he’s thinking about home. And he’s thinking why am I thinking this right now while I have elicit sex happening to my body. Does it make a difference if his body is in the suburbs while sex is happening? YES! At least in the sense that suburban culture is this counterpoint to Turner’s personal culture, where he’s using his body for thinking and sex times and pleasure and pleasuring. Think of the word “erotica” as the opposite of “suburbs.” Say erotica in your mouth so whichever part of that word interests you the most (for me it’s the “c” sound towards the end) machine-gun-repeats so that repeated letter sound is in your head, so it’s like a very physical body sex ASMR. You could read the whole book as though it were about pleasuring and reaching for a pleasure that might require some extreme reaching. Or you might read the book for how important it feels to tell people things. That Frank O’Hara mini-essay, “Personism” where he says talking on the phone is one of the best poetic forms to exist. And maybe Turner would say, “But have you tried writing letters?”
Because there’s a pleasure to letters. Their reflective attention. Their recursive energy. And for Gabriel’s book this letter-form meets unexpectedly with a poetics of eagerness. But eagerness in that sexual eagerness that’s both the hard pursuit of wanting more (some might call this the psychology of it), and eagerness as the gooey discharge that lingers as evidence of when there was so much eagerness. Yes to both. And yes to any OMG you might register about how elicit my terminology for eagerness is. But it’s biological science. It’s the eager insistent energy of fucking and the lackadaisical after-fucking, like what I read in T Fleischman’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. And it’s the literal contents of this book. If you like measuring life with coffee spoons filled with the bodily fluid of your choice, this is totally the book for you.
If reading for what goes through someone’s mind while they anticipate satisfying others’ needs, and of living with others’ erotic needs, and kind of “not giving a fuck” about what people in the suburbs say about what you’re thinking about, this is also the book for you. Yes, it’s likely you could start to spell out an erotics of need and eagerness. But keep in mind poems can be a state of mind, and their pursuit of completion (yes that kind of completion) can be more the mind dwelling on confusing and insistent, present-tense, sexual need. Layered by the letter-writing form, as though “Turner” has taken a step away from the sex-moment and started writing about the experience of being in a sex-moment, and you have to assume the sex-moment becomes more sexy for Turner when he writes about it. Or he just thinks about the future he will future with it. And what exactly is the position of a mind when it’s avidly aware of how the body is being treated, or consumed, or offered, or fashioned? This is Kay Gabriel’s book occupying a poetics of eagerness. Of next steps. Of sexiness constantly changing directions, because it’s very sexy to be doing that.
Because there’s a pleasure to letters. Their reflective attention. Their recursive energy. And for Gabriel’s book this letter-form meets unexpectedly with a poetics of eagerness. But eagerness in that sexual eagerness that’s both the hard pursuit of wanting more (some might call this the psychology of it), and eagerness as the gooey discharge that lingers as evidence of when there was so much eagerness. Yes to both. And yes to any OMG you might register about how elicit my terminology for eagerness is. But it’s biological science. It’s the eager insistent energy of fucking and the lackadaisical after-fucking, like what I read in T Fleischman’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. And it’s the literal contents of this book. If you like measuring life with coffee spoons filled with the bodily fluid of your choice, this is totally the book for you.
If reading for what goes through someone’s mind while they anticipate satisfying others’ needs, and of living with others’ erotic needs, and kind of “not giving a fuck” about what people in the suburbs say about what you’re thinking about, this is also the book for you. Yes, it’s likely you could start to spell out an erotics of need and eagerness. But keep in mind poems can be a state of mind, and their pursuit of completion (yes that kind of completion) can be more the mind dwelling on confusing and insistent, present-tense, sexual need. Layered by the letter-writing form, as though “Turner” has taken a step away from the sex-moment and started writing about the experience of being in a sex-moment, and you have to assume the sex-moment becomes more sexy for Turner when he writes about it. Or he just thinks about the future he will future with it. And what exactly is the position of a mind when it’s avidly aware of how the body is being treated, or consumed, or offered, or fashioned? This is Kay Gabriel’s book occupying a poetics of eagerness. Of next steps. Of sexiness constantly changing directions, because it’s very sexy to be doing that.
January 22, 2024
Ahhhhhhh how are sentences this gay and deadly possible:
"I’m in love with the future tense only, and keep it on a high shelf or hanging from my rearview mirror."
"As talentless stunner Jennifer North, Sharon Tate in the movie lilts all I know how to do is take off my clothes, and that feels about as right as pressure on the velveteen rope of a prostate."
"I think in profile I’m probably pretty cute though I don’t know what they see when they look at me—someone slight and accommodating. Men buy me things. In a parallel life it’s chasers, and in both the casting director picks out an antagonist of wives, a wife herself. Do I mind it? I think I mind it."
"Reader, I thrummed towards his furred thighs. I ringed him like a sleeve."
"Everybody gets to be sexy, like everybody gets to die. Warhol said something like that only he’s, admit it, a nihilist, we don’t do the same drugs. Here’s a fable: a girl grows a wolfish tail in the subdivisions."
"I wrote Bucks County on a diagonal from trans literature, because I don’t appreciate being first outed then hailed as pretty but dumb or hopelessly abstract, which I expect will continue until I scare off the haters pornographically."
"I thought that living with the tech girls of Brooklyn would solve my cash problems, but actually it means colliding daily with their halo of money."
"Morning, night and party hours each got their share but my vote went to the afternoon, when you get a real sense of the day going to waste in the prolonged shift from one arrangement to another."
"If people like to look at you, doesn’t that mean you win?"
"I taste like Condé Nast wonder-twinsed with Swiffer pads. I’ll bop to be upscaled. I am blissfully on call."
"You say wife like style or you say wife like rifled through someone else’s stocks or you say wife like wages."
"I do it for God and the television, with a promiscuous heart. I do it with prosthetics but apropos of anybody with an opinion about them: you are forbidden I want to say from evaluating my component parts, I’m an atom, fuck a metonymy, fuck a catalogue."
---
I can't parse 60% of the sentences in this book - I am doing the wrong drugs, having the wrong sex, reading the wrong polemics, and watching the wrong bad movies, and not nearly enough of any of them. I have never been in grad school queer-fucking the other queer people in grad school. I know no one very cool in Brooklyn.
But there is something horny, coy, critical, and bitter here that never quite reaches all the way to sex, seduction, revolt, or despair - some acid posture without a name that maybe doesn't have a name because it's too queer, too trans, too feminine, something that I recognize and feel the fire of. Some tincture of my friends. (I know none of these people, but I know these people.) This is a kind of poetry I don't so much love to read - reading implying something too much like consuming - as love to be with.
"I’m in love with the future tense only, and keep it on a high shelf or hanging from my rearview mirror."
"As talentless stunner Jennifer North, Sharon Tate in the movie lilts all I know how to do is take off my clothes, and that feels about as right as pressure on the velveteen rope of a prostate."
"I think in profile I’m probably pretty cute though I don’t know what they see when they look at me—someone slight and accommodating. Men buy me things. In a parallel life it’s chasers, and in both the casting director picks out an antagonist of wives, a wife herself. Do I mind it? I think I mind it."
"Reader, I thrummed towards his furred thighs. I ringed him like a sleeve."
"Everybody gets to be sexy, like everybody gets to die. Warhol said something like that only he’s, admit it, a nihilist, we don’t do the same drugs. Here’s a fable: a girl grows a wolfish tail in the subdivisions."
"I wrote Bucks County on a diagonal from trans literature, because I don’t appreciate being first outed then hailed as pretty but dumb or hopelessly abstract, which I expect will continue until I scare off the haters pornographically."
"I thought that living with the tech girls of Brooklyn would solve my cash problems, but actually it means colliding daily with their halo of money."
"Morning, night and party hours each got their share but my vote went to the afternoon, when you get a real sense of the day going to waste in the prolonged shift from one arrangement to another."
"If people like to look at you, doesn’t that mean you win?"
"I taste like Condé Nast wonder-twinsed with Swiffer pads. I’ll bop to be upscaled. I am blissfully on call."
"You say wife like style or you say wife like rifled through someone else’s stocks or you say wife like wages."
"I do it for God and the television, with a promiscuous heart. I do it with prosthetics but apropos of anybody with an opinion about them: you are forbidden I want to say from evaluating my component parts, I’m an atom, fuck a metonymy, fuck a catalogue."
---
I can't parse 60% of the sentences in this book - I am doing the wrong drugs, having the wrong sex, reading the wrong polemics, and watching the wrong bad movies, and not nearly enough of any of them. I have never been in grad school queer-fucking the other queer people in grad school. I know no one very cool in Brooklyn.
But there is something horny, coy, critical, and bitter here that never quite reaches all the way to sex, seduction, revolt, or despair - some acid posture without a name that maybe doesn't have a name because it's too queer, too trans, too feminine, something that I recognize and feel the fire of. Some tincture of my friends. (I know none of these people, but I know these people.) This is a kind of poetry I don't so much love to read - reading implying something too much like consuming - as love to be with.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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August 12, 2024This book checked a lot of my boxes: I love epistolary shit, I love gay shit, I love prose poetry, I love black and white photography and Wojnarowicz, and goddamn it even had a Kathy Acker quote right at the beginning. Yet for some reason it just did not do it for me. I think for one thing I am wary of authors that try to shock a reader through graphic descriptions of sex into thinking they are doing something above your head. Maggie Nelson is the worst at this. Nothing against graphic descriptions of sex, but it didn't really seem like there was much else beyond that here. It helped the reading when I started reading the poems out loud, it sort of felt like a lot of it was supposed to be super campy and acted out. That improved things, and maybe at a poetry reading this would be a lot of fun. But I'm left with the impression that I just read something someone wrote to fuck w people. Which I approve of in general, but in this case I just feel like I won't remember it. Oh, also, the author loses points for going to Princeton. And it's hard to take writers like this seriously when other writing they've done is extremely wordy and academic. A far cry from the writers who used this style back in the 80s, for example, Wojnarowicz himself.
August 21, 2023
Grateful 2 live under censorship mild enough to allow a book like this to get published.
Gabriel takes us through a hot gay labyrinth of trans femininity on trains n bleak freeways n against the mirror of ruthless capital. The structure of the book—chaotic epistolary sequences that oscillate between ultra profane and sad broken profound—is an ode to queer nature & the disassociated lives we lead. Missives on men, lovers, users, landlords, camp, desire, all with manic uncompromising integrity.
Gabriel takes us through a hot gay labyrinth of trans femininity on trains n bleak freeways n against the mirror of ruthless capital. The structure of the book—chaotic epistolary sequences that oscillate between ultra profane and sad broken profound—is an ode to queer nature & the disassociated lives we lead. Missives on men, lovers, users, landlords, camp, desire, all with manic uncompromising integrity.
April 9, 2024
This book was such a treat!!! Shocking at first, and I thought I lost it on the plane and then missed it so bad until I found it again. I picked this up because Pennsylvania mention! But it served me something so unexpected. I have absolutely nothing to compare this collection to. i havent read anything like it before. I really adored the way it explored identity through the use of the heteronym and the idea of a heteronym at all. Not the type of thing i would usually read but im glad my mind saw septa on the first page and decided this was worth it. The kind of book that made me hungry for more words. Read it mostly in one sitting. Recommend to all (poetry for prose and poetry lovers alike, maybe for the more gruesome at heart).
April 13, 2024
Look if I read this at 25--or even 28--and if I lived in New York City at that age and if I had an MFA, I would love this, but I couldn't and I didn't and I don't, and I just can't say this was enjoyable--or even worthwhile--beyond its technical skill.
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July 30, 2025first grindr-hookups-as-fiction i've enjoyed! not sure i actually understand Kay or the world more deeply for having read this, but maybe that's on me. thanks to lily for lending me this window into the ridgewick autofic scene
August 15, 2023
I am going to have to read this again soon.
September 29, 2023
soso good…. kay gabriel is an inspiration. big fan!!!!
November 12, 2023
Had to look up so many words.
January 23, 2024
This was craaaazyyyyyy - not my usual read, mostly poetry and hard to follow but I’m glad I did. A read for Jon’s book club
March 12, 2024
The epistolary rly sweet. “Turner” as an identity cool and trippy. Forms so creative, inc that bit that was a dialogue w vampire mortgage etc. could never imagine being this horny :(
March 31, 2024
can all poetry be this horny please
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews