To a Severe Burning Grudge or Two: Lyric Strategies of Self-Disclosure in Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Bucks County

ABSTRACT: This article reads Kay Gabriel’s 2022 epistolary series A Queen in Bucks County to theorize aesthetic strategies of self-disclosure: techniques for the expression of gendered subjectivity that allow people—inside and outside of poems—to retain agency over the parameters of gendered expression. In Bucks County , these strategies include the citation of the lyric and epistolary genres, and those genres’ operative figures: lyric subjectivity and direct address. This article also considers how disciplinary quibbles about the ontology of the lyric, and attendant discourse about the role of genre study in literature departments, provide an explicitly aesthetic frame for discussions of gendered ontology. Gabriel’s poetic strategies, and their interactions with scholarly discourse about poetic genre and figuration, substantiate a defense of the affordances of the lyric “I,” a generically specific figure for subjectivity that structures a reflexive aesthetic autonomy trans critique preserves.