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.
