Bucks County, Pa. sits squarely between Philly and Trenton, N.J. Google Images will tell you that it’s a wholesome land of pumpkin patches and cutesy clapboards. But Kay Gabriel’s freewheeling narrator, Turner, will tell you the truth.
Though Turner, “Epistoslut” extraordinaire, spends little time in Bucks County itself, his raunchy dispatches—some written from SEPTA—do away with the shiny veneer of the Northeast Corridor. Gabriel’s collection follows his letters as he recounts his sexual escapades, job struggles, and growing political conscience.
Laced with familiar sights, Turner’s letters are written from the fringes of apple pie–suburbia. An early poem sees Turner observe his surroundings: “the shadow of a Wawa, a pair of withering cities, their gutted suburban corridor.” But urban bleakness quickly gives way to a playful, erotic narrative.
Throughout, Gabriel experiments with eroticism, from making subtle puns like “doppelbanger” to using sexuality as a yardstick for Turner’s everyday hardships. “If it gets any colder,” remarks Turner, “my nipples’ll get hard enough to slash through the front of my shirt.” Gabriel’s use of sexuality transforms the image of a shivering young man into a flippant vignette.
But eroticism has another function in this collection: a way to rewrite the American playbook of love, lust, and luxury. Embarking on a vacation tryst in Vermont, Turner reflects: “I’ve never been [to Vermont] but I’ve got pictures of it, Vermont toilets in the background of a squat, aggressively pink–tipped cock bobbing over Vermont water.” For all his outré behavior, Gabriel’s narrator remains enthralled by old–school American iconography.
The collection often sees the luxe and the low collide. In an early poem, Turner compares a cyclist on the Tour de France to a “hunk masseur pummel[ing] your bf’s ass,” upper–class entertainment made accessible through Turner’s brazen lust. Likewise, Gabriel’s speaker pairs Special K with the towering John Cazale; lawbreaking with Disney powerhouse Howard Ashman. The same way that Gabriel uses language to invert celebrity status, she uses sex to challenge class subjugation.
Prior to a sexual encounter, Turner texts a friend: “When he leaves [...] I’d better be raw like health–hazard meat. I really wanted him to get the right idea. I’m neat like a rosewater cronut with sprinkles and a shave of ice.” Herein lies the work’s revolutionary heart, as Gabriel pivots from the pang of food insecurity to a glittering bougie confection. In Gabriel’s narrative, sexual relations are not exempt from capitalism’s rulebook; instead, sex is a commodity exchange like any other—a universal reality that Gabriel renders poignantly.
By contrast, A Queen in Bucks County loses some of its strip mall sparkle through Gabriel’s occasional reluctance to render explicit sexual scenes, well, explicitly. In an early vignette, a character gets fisted in a suburban bedroom, climaxing on Star Wars sheets. But the concept is rendered too self–consciously to sustain an entire page. Instead of funny, we get limp dialogue and awkward references to Mark Hamill and Darth Vader. Luckily, Gabriel is much better when she isn’t blushing.
Another poem, “Bread,” likens sourdough, then lemons, then a host of other things, to anal penetration. The somewhat scattershot tone of the letter coheres in the deadpan final line: “Reader, if you had been present you would have been spritzed with Mike’s cock like a fine dense mist!” The poem is signed off with the equally witty “Dinner’s ready”—a fine example of the deep, cutting irony that prevents the work from reading like a boring litany of Turner’s kinky capers.
During another tryst, Turner muses: “Flat iron, tree line, perineum. Fair enough, I supposed, I giggled, I let him in again. Runway, carpet, slip n’ slide.” As readers, we want Turner to reappropriate these oft–cited pop culture symbols, rob them of their coveted status. If he doesn’t fully manage, Gabriel’s poetry still succeeds at pointing the finger at the privileged reader.
In particular, Turner’s disenchantment as he rubs shoulders with New York’s wealthy feels all too accurate. “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 … ‘I just need something, I need a third credit card,’ my roommate says.” Sound familiar yet?
But Gabriel’s breakdown of the moneyed, doe–eyed offspring of the rich and famous is more than snark. Brooklyn bobos are nothing new. What’s new is this collection’s suggestion of radical possibility. Besides pieces and purses, Turner dreams of labor reform: “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.” The ultimate object of Turner’s imagination is that the conditions of utopia should be viewed as natural.
Sweet, subtle moments of renewal dot the collection. In a beautiful passage, Turner observes that the “rain has commenced its delicate lament over the orchards, talented, having a great time.” But he never loses his lip, like when remarking “a then–boyfriend jerked me off with commas!” or uttering a request to “Keep me coyly in your ear for winter.” Bucks County is an unlikely lesson in the renewing power of language—cheeky and inventive and altogether beautiful. But that’s selling these poems short.
The cachet of Bucks County goes beyond booze and blues: The collection sparkles with revolutionary verve. Fifty odd years ago, student activists were dubbed the “children of Marx and Coca–Cola”; today’s kids were weaned on reality TV and revolutionary rose emojis. These poems ask whether revolution can culminate in camp, kinky fun. At the heart of the collection is Turner’s snappy, earnest credo for the future: “[W]e’ll shed our rent like onion skins. I want to blow the roof off the world as much as anybody, with half the spite. I also want to get fucked. What do these have to do with each other? This is my nasty, gentle gift.”
Wants and hopes like Turner’s matter precisely because of their modesty. It’s 2022—the icecaps are melting and Europe is burning and sunflower oil is running short. Yesterday’s doomsday predictions are today’s routine facts. Gabriel’s vision of the future works because it’s not an idyll of free love and endless sunshine—but a world where the pleasure of leisure has become banal reality. Bucks County gives us concrete aspirations cloaked in rail yard glamor and glitz.
