2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST!
An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.
InA 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 Countyis an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.
US
Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. With Andrea Abi-Karam, she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She’s the author of Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa Press, 2021) and A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat Books, 2022). She grew up in Toronto and lives in Queens. "'This thing,' Turner declares, 'is multiform, contingent, ambivalent, and I call her my sex. Even if I make choices I still like everything.' Bucks County imagines desire as a constant, not a crisis, but it is a constant that is flexible and porous, with a poetics to match. Its formal omnivorousness makes it by turns friendly and rebarbative, breezy and firm, offering a solid reminder that the most heretical attitudes toward form often give the strongest evidence of what it can do. If form is a figure for the ways we are bound, always, to the demand to make sense to others, it is also a means by which we unravel, exultantly, from ourselves."—Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books
“l/
![A Queen in Bucks County [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/2/5/7/2_7204858.jpg "A Queen in Bucks County [Paperback]")