Kissing Other People or the House of Fame

Author: Kay Gabriel

Publisher: Nightboat Books (2023)

Kissing Other People or the House of Fame calls the bluff on Chaucer’s boast, expressed in his poem “The House of Fame,” to have dreamt the best. Composed out of a year of the author’s dream journal, the title poem puts its perverse syntax to work in a maximalist jaunt of surprising collisions, cunning errors, nightly displacements, work, parties, plays, and repressed—which is to say, permissive—speech. Ingest your theory with Advil and water, Gabriel says, or did her dreams say it for her? Kissing Other People is an experiment in mouthing collective language, on the premise that what seems irretrievably personal is in fact most social and most shared.