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Monsters, body horror, and terror have a long and storied literary relationship with representations of queer experiences, social ostracization, and trauma—a relationship which presents a series of predictable tropes that are easy to fall into. In CD Eskilson’s debut poetry collection Scream/Queen, Eskilson spectacularly avoids and at times wittily critiques these clichés, presenting a beautifully original series of poems which play with familiar themes and poetic forms in practiced, unique ways.
Eskilson’s terrifying images and horrific metaphors are rich and deliberate. Poems like “On Witchcraft,” “Confession from Medusa’s Head,” and “Portrait as Werewolf,” bring familiar monsters to the forefront, using them to familiarize contemporary LGBTQIA+ experiences while also making some of mythology’s most iconic antagonists empathetic and nuanced. These monstrous metaphors have clear connections to persecution and violence but also imbue a sense of power and community into the poem. The vulnerability of monsters is at the forefront of “Portrait as Werewolf,” where Eskilson uses elements common in werewolf literature to magnify the poem’s intimacy and the speaker’s resilience:
pass silver coins between our mouths.
I wear a new white dress
and flower crown, rhinestones beaded
to my snout. Flash a fang for you
Later lines use the werewolf’s iconic anatomy to describe the speaker’s bodily comfort and victory while also accounting for the sacrifice and grief inherent in the poem:
Spark a gleam against your claw
And offer prey. I lick my lips,
I kiss the moon: it took so long
To get here.
As is true of the collection at large, Scream/Queen’s horror concept is both playful and powerful in this poem. It provides narrative tension and a sense of anxiety which is crucial for the stories the poems tell, while also providing a sense of well-earned closure and safety for the poem’s monsters and humans alike. Eskilson makes it clear in their writing that there is more to the stories of all things we are told go bump in the night, redeeming monsters and redirecting horror tropes which have historically demonized trans experiences, while also creating a collection of poems that allows for the celebration of community, love, survival, and self.
Scream/Queen’s conceptual strength is fortified by its structural experimentation. Throughout the collection, poetic technique varies greatly. Most clearly, Eskilson includes poems which use differing white space, line lengths, meters, and figurative devices; however, the collection also engages with several different poetic genres and conceptual forms. Scream/Queen includes poems which experiment with footnotes, scattered and blacked out text, subheads, and hypothetical film pitches. When reading the collection in sequence, this variety highlights the intentionality of word order and line breaks, as well as Eskilson’s focus on speaker perspective. These choices make Scream/Queen a delightfully cohesive collection. By connecting themes of transness, generational trauma, health, and love with a consistently emotive and personal tone, Eskilson makes room for the varying of structure and presentation in their poems without sacrificing the collection’s cohesion. Their ability to do so provides the reader with an especially active relationship with the poems.
In particular, “Trans Panic Contrapuntal” and “I Séance with My Uncle at MacArthur Park” display Eskilson’s mastery of the reader-poet relationship by manipulating the very root of what makes “meaning” in poetry. With line breaks allowing for multiple readings, the “different” versions of the poem display the intense precision and intentionality in Eskilson’s writing. In “Trans Panic Contrapuntal,” Eskilson writes “not the soft, smooth neck,” a line which through the poem’s split can be read as describing the speaker’s desired partner or alternatively as the speaker’s own neck. The first of these potential readings, achieved by reading one side of the break at a time, results in the following stanza:
I wanted to kiss a boy
on the throat
not the soft, smooth neck
but the protruding, tough core
of a boy’s throat
The reader choosing to read across the vertical break results in the following order:
I wanted to kiss a boy/ like pairing the skin’s secrets/ on the throat/ while clawmarks hid my razor burn/ not the soft, smooth neck/ the plum that his hands yearned/ but the protruding, tough core/ hinted at peach stubble/of a boy’s throat
These two meanings provide equally emotive and raw experiences for the reader, with neither being neglected in the poem’s construction. As examples of excellent poetic craftmanship, these poems set the tone for Scream/Queen’s deliberate construction and attention to reader experience, elements of the collection which make it a refreshingly inventive, critically genius work of poetry.
Book Review by Lillian Durr
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