It’s been said many times before that the dreams of others are boring. I, too, get bored very quickly when someone tells me their dreams—unless I’m in love with the dreamer or if I imagine that I’m the dreamer’s analyst. Kay Gabriel’s latest collection, Perverts, which was published this September by Nightboat Books, is a poem in the epic mode whose subject is the author’s friends’ dreams. Fortunately, though, the book is not simply a collection of recounted reveries, but also a highly social, intertextual theory of the dream, set in an epic form that covers pop culture, futurity, poetics, and sex.

Perverts is Gabriel’s third collection with Nightboat, following A Queen in Bucks County (2022) and Kissing other People or the House of Fame (2023). Her verse, in both collections, wanders, scans, dreams, and drifts with both broad abstraction and intellectual precision. Perverts takes the stylistic proclivities in Gabriel’s verse and accentuates them in an epic poem that, among other things, portrays a social milieu’s sleeping life, creating a social world out of many people’s dreams.

Whatever hesitance I brought with me began to ease in the opening pages, where the speaker addresses the reader and a dreamer named Christian: 

Christian my conspiratorial eyelash thief has not
yet sent me his dreams
Christian this is where your dreams will go in this canto
of an epic poem stitched together from the dreams of
friends or strangers, delegates
of the dream assembly

who writes an epic poem in the 2020s? Perverts

That smirking response, “Perverts,” captures what makes Gabriel’s verse so special: its nimble, playful, self-referential voice, its combination of bold artistry and lack of self-seriousness. Before I ever read any of Gabriel’s work, I had heard her poems were really hot. Her erotic world in Perverts, however, is more about the implications of sexuality in everyday life than the intensities of desire. There are sex scenes here, but what dominates is a platonic cuddling and collective imagination, the “dizzy hot” eroticism of dissolving into the dreams of friends. If this treatment of sex is meant to translate into the political, it may be, as the speaker states in her friend’s dream, that the erotic is a celebration done best by transsexuals: “she starts talking about the last words of W.H. / Auden and transphobia. ‘Nobody’s more / celebratory of the erotic than trans people.’” 

Perverts is full of references: the salt tax of the 1780s, Stalin’s unread Marx saved from CUNY’s burning library, Riis beach, Hegel, and a brick in a Telfar bag, just to name a few. These references help to produce a very smart, camp antic:

And nobody died: optimism!
Well I think that’s funny
I’m being dialectical so you don’t have to
I lived with a guy who said: it won’t be
a good revolution if I survive it

Gabriel’s multi-vocal, reference-dense style comes across like a smile, an awareness of the verse itself as an affect, a meticulous and wild place for the living world to react, add, recite and fall into. The poem becomes less a work of individual artistry than a collective expression, a composition of friends, by friends. Fittingly, one of its most frequent metaphors is the march:

Then I’m on an interminable march
to a coded destination. There’s a chase,
there’s cops, there’s friends.
I’d walk into traffic for them
if I had to, but why do I have to?

Why do we have to sacrifice (walk into traffic) for our friends to survive? What kind of world requires us to? Gabriel knows that this is a world people have been protesting for generations, “interminabl[y],” as in this glimpse of a dreamer’s grandfather: 

my grandfather too briefly a socialist
architect before he left Apartheid South
Africa, moved to Montreal
and designed shopping
plazas and sometimes homes
I dreamt of a march proceeding
slowly to his house in Ottawa
it’s the object of a protest and it’s Ridgewood too

In the Jungian tradition, each symbol or person in a dream represents a part of the dreamer’s psyche. In the Perverts theory of the dream, dreams are a form of inventive group thinking, a cooperative event that articulates a vision for the future. As the verse gains momentum, the reader is flung into a mise en abyme of dreams within dreams, swinging back and forth with cultural references and conversations between dream and dreamer, friend and friend, lover and lover, writer and verse, and verse and reader. This intertextual foundation makes the collection complicated, dense with names, and at times hard to follow. It is akin, in a sense, to seeing an adventuresome performance piece: fascinating and memorable, but challenging. 

“Perverts theory of the dream, dreams are a form of inventive group thinking, a cooperative event that articulates a vision for the future.”

The gallery of references and images in Perverts does what critic Peter Schejeldahl once remarked of Wolfgang Tillman’s genius: “They obliterate pop dialectics of high and low art.” Gabriel’s engagement brings fleeting contemporary pop cultural residue into the epic mode, melding the day-to-day with one of poetry’s most ancient forms. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes when Kate Moss appeared as a labor organizer in a glitter bodysuit, but, on the very same page, Gabriel took my breath away:

At an art show or university,
Anu also dreams of prison breaks.
An organizer from Critical
Resistance presents research about “knots,”
which demonstrate the breakdown of structure
over time. There’s a test:
he asks Anu what he thinks his conclusions
mean for the future. She despairs of it:
a scorched-earth end to things. Wrong,
he says: It means that prisons are, eventually,
going to be abolished

Is that a guarantee? It’s faith.

Throughout Perverts, Gabriel is the coolest person at the party. Her voice feels effortlessly perspicacious, and she has the conviction of a literary star. If the world is ending, prisons will too: catastrophe can be fortuitous. It’s a frank look at a liberatory future, one that glows off the page into my imagination, becoming, for a moment, my own faith too.