Perverts
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Nightboat Books
Published:13th Nov '25
Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date
Advance Reader Copies
ARCs sent to sales reps as well as in galley box to indie bookstores
Digital ARCs sent to media for national print, radio, and online campaign
Social media campaign, with the book promoted by key literary influencers focusing on Queer, Trans and political literature.
Promotion on Nightboat’s e-newsletter and interview on Nightboat Blog
Submission to major literary and book awards
Simultaneous print and e-book release
Launch event in NYC, author works at The Poetry Project and hosts raves in NYC, as well as national tour
Email [email protected] for physical galleys
Perverts traverses the psychic landscapes of Kay Gabriel and her community of friends, writers and organizers, piecing together a collective dream that both mirrors and transforms waking life.
Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. It asks two questions at the same time: whose desire is understood as dangerously excessive? And—a classic organizer’s question—how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause..
"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
ISBN: 9781643622941
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
96 pages