Book Review

CD Eskilson’s debut, Scream / Queen, is full of slashes. The punctuation mark divides the book’s title and each of its sections: “Found/Footage,” “Body / Horror,” “Jump / Scare, “Para / Normal,” and “Super / Natural.” A slash typically indicates a binary, whether between opposites or synonyms: either/or; sir/madam; mind/body. It joins pronouns (they/them) and characters with multiple names (Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill). And in a book that takes on horror, both in film and in life, the word slash itself expands to encompass many meanings. The slash’s prominence in this book challenges the very binary of division and integration, two extremes that the stories of trans, nonbinary, and queer people can be forced into. The reality that Eskilson evokes in their poems—experiences of actual trans and nonbinary people—is neither all anguished dysphoria nor all triumphant harmony. It’s much more complicated and interesting.

Eskilson’s book begins in the voice of a film monster, King Ghidorah, and poems about other monsters (Geryon, Medusa, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, witches, werewolves) follow throughout the book. What is it like to be regarded as an object of horror and fascination? What is it like to feel that way about someone else? Yourself? Eskilson takes on all of these questions, never being reductive in their metaphors: “Statues of Hecate show a triple-headed goddess. A being far too myriad for just one mouth,” they write in “On Witchcraft,” “I scour terms for remedy that can also mean poison.” The long poem “Prey: A Gloss,” which begins the book’s third section, embodies this layered premise by blending critics’ and directors’ words with Eskilson’s own in order to complicate motifs like trans panic and the “final girl.”

The same complexity imbues the many other poems about the filmic representation of women, trans, and nonbinary people. Eskilson takes on the perspectives of the characters themselves, of a student of film theory, a critic. They interrogate the way that queer readings of Sleepaway Camp or The Silence of the Lambs can transform problematic representation without excusing it. About Sleepaway Camp specifically (an absurd, campy, horror classic example of trans panic), they write:

the film’s

subversion sharpens: critiques of gendered

violence, forced dysphoria merge. Can’t we

hold both readings of the movie to be true?

The ability to hold multiple truths isn’t unique to the queer community, but it is a muscle that many of us develop as we contend with a world whose narrow truths fail to accommodate us.

Eskilson’s poems are linguistically and formally captivating; they insist on their own terms. I found the language in “Portrait with Inconclusive Lab Results” particularly arresting—echoing “plum” with “plummet,” nestling five words with hard G sounds into two lines about making the indescribable solid. A doctor in the poem speaks in “a voice reserved for things with fur”—one of those lines you wish you’d written. Eskilson also skillfully incorporates borrowing and erasure, pulling words from government proposals, movie reviews, and notably, the dialogue between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling about whether Buffalo Bill is a “real transsexual.” (A complex portrayal of transness, to say the least . . .)

I also need to mention the threads of heredity and mental illness that run through the book—themes that also populate horror movies. “When People Tell You GAD Can’t Be That Bad” is a masterful representation of how anxiety works, short and beautiful lines with insidiously long and violent footnotes. It not only renders the idea of different public and private faces, but also how anxiety can distort the innocuous and pleasant (forests, flowers) into something menacing. These threads are woven together strikingly in “Heredity,” a compact poem in which I found more each time I read it. The image of tracing faulty wiring (a common stand-in for brain activity), of investigating, leads to this devastating conclusion: “Nobody told me knowing / would do little—I’d still end up a house falling.” Much later in the book, this idea is echoed in “Our Family Leaves the Haunted House.” The poem’s lone one-line stanza, “what if we left the site of violence?”, breaks open the whole book. It’s not a question with an obvious or hopeful answer—but simply asking the question is forward movement.

It’s tempting to say that Scream / Queen bends toward hope. It’s something we all desperately want right now. And there is a hope that springs up more often near the end of the book, but it’s spiky and grounded. There isn’t a hero holding up the head of the killer, but there is fierce solidarity in the face of continued onslaught, particularly in the last, tender poem that I won’t spoil for you. You should read its beautiful lines yourself and, if you’re like me, cry in a hotel room when you’re supposed to be meeting your friends for dinner. But I will tell you that “Arkansas Bans Healthcare for Trans Youth” ends with “Night swells, but we don’t stop taking shafts of / deserved sun. We hold our brilliance in dim hours.” These are dim hours indeed, and Scream / Queen knows that slashers almost always have sequels.