Review by James O'Leary
Horror and violence are common themes among many of the queer writers I know. As I type the first words to this review, it is early January 2025, the start of a new year already filling many Americans with trepidation. In just a few weeks, a criminal, fascist president will take control of the country once more, and he fills his waiting time with speeches and press releases, cycling violent rhetoric targeting minorities, particularly immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. To be specific, the rhetoric against the latter group targets transgender people, a result of a backward shifting of the Overton window that has many trans people more afraid to be themselves, and more targeted by harassment, violence, and political legislation than they were a decade ago. While the American South faces record winter storms, I watch firetrucks race out my window toward record wildfires in LA county, both of these events are the price of the last 100 years of unchecked fossil fuel usage’s wreck on our home planet. The most popular news story of the last several months involved the public murder of the CEO of United Healthcare, which sparked a countrywide dis-cussion of the myriad ways the health insurance industry denies people medical care they need to live, while lining the pockets of its higher administrators with millions of dollars in profit. In short, I am think-ing about survival—and I’m grateful to have CD Eskilson’s book of poems, Scream / Queen (Acre Books), as my lyrical companion.
Sectioned in five parts with titles like “Jump / Scare” and “Para / Normal,” Scream / Queen is in-terested in the genre of horror, from the slasher flicks like Halloween to the monsters of Greek myth, the personal horrors of mental illness, to the societal horrors of state violence. But Eskilson’s speaker has a complicated, doubled relationship with the threat of violence, sometimes invoking the voice of the horror monster, sometimes depicting the monster as an outsider to systems that have failed to understand it. The book opens on the poem, “King Ghidorah,” evoking the three-headed nemesis of Godzilla, but the reader is immediately welcomed to themes of survival, illness, and performance with the lines
I don’t know surviving to a sequel
or how to speak about anxiety outside disaster.I’ve perfected shrieking onlooker,
the dodge and weave of plans and scramble
over sentences.
The poem, which goes on to establish violences of inheritance, self-harm, and betrayal by loved ones, ends on the image of the speaker transformed into the titular King Ghidorah, releasing destruction on a city that seems to know nothing besides causing the speaker pain. The humanization of horror’s creatures is often a queer reading of monster tales in general, and Eskilson’s book offers a wide selection of tragic monstrosities: Geryon’s “life a violated sky,” Medusa “A skull dragged down / by all that it can’t vessel,” the Headless Horseman able “To hold / my head, its flaming, and let every ember singe.” The reader is brought along for the blood, miasma, and body horror proffered dripping with cinematic lyricism and ear-nest, human voices that beg for understanding at the intersections of pity and disgust, of love and of what self-defense looks like with fangs, with chainsaw, with axe.
Interlaced with these monster persona pieces lie poems more interested in the cross-examination of film history and criticism. “At the Midnight show of Sleepaway Camp” is both movie ekphrasis and a story of queer people watching a movie which makes monsters of their bodies:
the image we’re all killers remains deadly,
has only grown more mainstream. But other
in our group push back defend the film.All huddled at a Denny’s, we listen to them
fawn over catharsis in a murder-fest.
Admit over plates of fries to dreams
of wasting bullies, dropping angry beehiveson assholes throwing slurs.
And this is not the only account of the complicated relationship between violence and catharsis, between identifying with both monstrosity and victimhood. The notes section describes a craft background of the poem “Every Man Their Mortal Enemy, Every Woman’s Beauty Prey”, drawing attention to the Creature from Creature from the Black Lagoon’s queer-coded relationship with gender and desire (horror often being drawn to the messy blurring across desire-for-love, desire-for-sex, and desire-for-violence). The poem “Prey: A Gloss” stands as yet another mirror into which Scream / Queen reflects film criticism and culture’s relationship to femininity and queerness as, through the conceit of a glossary, it uses the language of trope, movie pitch, and artistic vision alongside quotes about Final Girls and directors whose work perpetuates stereotypes of trans bodies as psychopathic killers. And this is but a fraction of what is on offer: Eskilson’s debut collection is a veritable film festival of ekphrasis, persona, and reference, a book-length conceit which culminates as short history of film-horror’s cultural effects on queer people and personal pride/devastation that comes with a relationship with this genre of media.
But it would also be reductive to say that Scream / Queen contains only poems related to horror and cinema. Each section contains individual poems which, while sometimes passingly related to these themes, speak to a breadth of eye and a thoughtful consideration of the world that makes Eskilson’s such a bright debut. Powerful poems punctuate each monster: OCD litanies, tragic and earnest portraits of family trau-ma, short verse bildungsroman about navigating love, alcoholism, and leaving home. It is hard not to feel amazed how the speaker holds such doubt and uncertainty about their own trans identity while repeatedly, with detailed care and attention, stating and sharing their love for their trans sibling. Startling in its depic-tion of place and home, “The Ocean Within Me” is a three-page long piece shaped into short prose blocks, meditating on the speaker’s relationship to Bruce’s Beach in LA County, and the racism that saw the US government strip this piece of land from its original Black owners, a violence that continues to deprive generations of Black families from the wealth, community, and connection to the ocean that this piece of land offered. Visions of terror and the Klan burning down the original resort are not avoided as the speak-er reckons with their personal responsibility to the violence done in an area of personal significance to them, and how this changes their relationship to county, ocean, and home.
For myself, the platonic ideal of Scream / Queen can be found in the poem “Ghost Story with My Uncle.” This poem is a lyric snapshot of two tragedies contained in one household, a story of closetedness and shame, both the grief it takes to haunt and the grief felt by the haunted. Though the speaker describes their Uncle’s “hunt for sweetness” in gender, and for brief moments finds happiness and desire “in smokeblue swells of back seats,” the reader knows at this point in the book not to trust that the emotions in this first stanza will last. The “ghost” is haunted, at first, by passing homophobia: “bruising stare, cracked windshield / in the parking lot”, but soon the ghost’s parents take exorcism of the extraordinary into their own hands as they
find the thrift-store heels, shriek
and curse possession. Call in counselors
to shoo locusts down his throatand gnaw him see-through.
“Ghost Story with My Uncle” continues, broken and ragged, with glimmers of survival peeking through like passing whispers of a phantom. Against alcoholism, against family trauma, against police, against sys-temic violence and interpersonal violence, shame and uncertainty, when the boy-ghost wishes “he was mist… something shapeless other pass through / and will never try to hold” it is both tragedy and tri-umph, a story any marginalized body can feel gratitude and grief for in the same breath. Readers will feel themselves, and all the ones they’ve known and loved, as invisible specters of memory move in the silence the poem leaves in its wake.
As I finish Eskilson’s book for the third time, a little over a month has passed. I doom scroll through pictures of the continuing fires; a new administration’s policies roll back decades of trans ac-ceptance and safety; billionaire oligarchs toss up and defend the Nazi salute while ripping apart aid pro-grams. I am grateful to have the poems of Scream / Queen as a companion in this time of infamy, to remind me how to hold the anxieties and necessary loves together, the horror and human grief. If I’m a monster, there’s strength in knowing what’s possible when backed into a corner. If I’m a final girl, whether or not I survive won’t be related to whether or not I’m good; and there is such strength, isn’t there, in deciding when and how I am going to scream.
CD Eskilson is a trans nonbinary poet, editor, and literary translator. Their work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Offing, Pleiades, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North, and other publications. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright / Academy of American Poets Prize and have been nominated for the Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen (2025), is published by Acre Books. CD serves as poetry co-editor at Split Lip Magazine and is a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal reading team. Previously, CD was the poetry editor at Expo-sition Review, where they also served on the board. CD earned their MFA from the University of Arkan-sas, where they received the Walton Family Fellowship in Poetry, the James T. Whitehead Award in Po-etry, the James E. & Ellen Wadley Roper Fellowship in Creative Writing, and the Lily Peter Fellowship in Translation.
James O’Leary is a queer poet and educator from Arizona. Their work has been nominated for the Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Booth, Foglifter, The Kenyon Review, Poet Lore, & more. James holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for ANMLY, and is currently working on their first full-length poetry manuscript. For a time, James tried the name Willow James Claire. They live in southern California.