“This poem derives from an ongoing sonnet cycle for and about the Warhol superstar Candy Darling (1944-1974). I like the sonnet as a form that, on the one hand, permissively allows for a kind of extralinguistic excess—a slurry of words, sounds or lines with little obvious connection between them—and on the other, tends towards a kind of philosophical argument under the veil of courtly love. In this project I’m using the sonnet to foreground a certain, specifically trans, relationship to pop culture and celebrity, one that trades on past images and cultural modes as fuel for its self-consciously overblown style. Darling, for instance, resurrected an eclipsed studio-system Hollywood in Warhol’s anarchic Factory, and I find that appealingly perverse. Relatedly, I’m trying to explore the lyric as a mode capable of both realistic self-narration and of aggressively inhabiting other registers of speech: lies, hysteria, seduction, invective.”
—Kay Gabriel