CD Eskilson’s debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen (March 15, Acre Books) is a smart, self-assured exploration of horror and thriller tropes as they relate to the body, identity, mental illness, and the trans panic. Their reflections on stories ranging from Jaime Lee Curtis as “final girl” in Halloween, to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, to the goddess Hecate, are structurally inventive and work to unpack the implications behind depictions of and relations to the monstrous. How do they play out in fiction, intergenerational trauma, and politics? What do the scary stories told at any given time reveal about society, and the self?
Eskilson’s examinations of terror and violence tread through darkness with unexpected warmth and playfulness. Conflict and struggle lead not towards despair or isolation, but towards the possibility of survival and grace. To confront the monstrous, real or imagined, is to bet on your own ability to find your way into the light again.
Eskilson, who currently lives in Los Angeles, is the poetry co-editor at Split Lip Magazine. Their work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. We talked over the phone in advance of the March release of Scream / Queen.
Gina Tomaine: I’m excited to talk about Scream / Queen—and you have a translation of Finland Swedish poet Edith Södergran’s debut collection coming out with World Poetry Books next year, right?
CD Eskilson: Yes! [Translating] Södergran was a very different sort of project. I worked on both books around the same time, but it was nice to go back and forth. When I got sick of my poems, I looked at somebody else’s poems; when I got sick of somebody else’s poems, I looked at mine again. They kind of twinned in that way.
There’s a fun dichotomy between your film-centered collection—musing on more modern pop cultural, political, and gender issues—and this other very different project. What compelled you about Södergran’s work, and translation in general?
Edith Södergran primarily wrote in Swedish. She actually knew six languages, which is pretty wild, but she was part of this ethnic linguistic minority that still exists in Finland. I have a Swedish grandfather, so I got interested in translating from Swedish, and University of Arkansas [where I did my MFA] has a translation track in addition to poetry and fiction. I came to Edith’s work because I was curious about who gets picked in terms of translation projects, who catches people’s attention. We’ll often see a lot of translations of a particular person. With Swedish specifically, there’s tons of a great poet—Tomas Tranströmer—but he’s sort of the only one. I was looking back and seeing folks who were influential and have been overlooked for a variety of reasons: Södergran is one of them. She’s this monumental figure within Nordic literature, who reinvented a lot of the ways people think about modern poetry—in that she was working outside the traditional, very formal, very metrically-oriented ways of writing in the early 1900s. She was ridiculed and reviled and faced tons of sexism and allegations of, “Oh, she’s just a crazy woman writing poems in her mom’s house,” which we’ve all heard before for other folks. That sort of interested me—what was going on that upset these people so much?
In the 1940s, after her death in the ‘20s, there was this immense critical reevaluation of her work. She writes in a very different way than Emily Dickinson, but sort of has achieved a similar status in parts of Scandinavia, where people probably read her poems in school. Going from that critical mass disdain to becoming this well-known figure—that was very interesting. I wanted to start with her first book and think about what was going on or what was happening there. It was a book that confused a lot of people when it came out, people didn’t really know what to do with it because it was just very different than what they had seen. I was interested in working with a woman Swedish poet, someone who also interrogates a lot of gender in her writing and thinks through the idea of gender binary in a way that was very avant-garde.
What inspired you to orient Scream / Queen around thrillers and horror movies?
I’ve been into horror movies and things that are scary or creepy since I was a little kid. I was obsessed with monsters and found something comforting about them. I would sit up and before kindergarten I would watch The Wolf Man on VHS. As I was writing the collection, I started to understand more about myself and the person I was, or how the ways I interact with things like gender or sexuality are talked about by other people. Things started to feel like they were circling back again. I started to understand why I was so interested in monster stories as a kid.
I was writing a lot of these poems in early 2021 and 2022, living in Arkansas, and that was around when the first healthcare ban for trans youth was happening. This has obviously been going on for decades, but [during] the initial aggressive dehumanization, and vilification of trans and nonbinary people, I was noticing a lot of parallels between the ways that slasher movies or thrillers—especially ones from the ‘80s— create narratives with trans panic or gender panic. A way of rationalizing that to myself was to do that comparison of, “Oh, the way people talk about me (or talk about my community) feels like it’s pulled out of a horror movie.”
In many horror movies you have a character like the “Final Girl” — that archetypal female figure that has somewhat of an ambiguously coded relationship to gender and femininity— who is the one that survives, the one that encounters this violence, encounters this sort of horrific act, and then is able to live or is able to navigate that. There was something very cathartic about that—this idea of seeing parallels or seeing some sort of model for survival. That was another aspect of horror that felt comforting and compelled me to take that as the lens—this idea of what kinds of survival can we learn about? What different ways are there of articulating the harm going on, so it can be understood?
The concept of the ‘Final Girl’ existing beyond gender norms resonates. Could you speak a little bit more about that?
I did a lot of film theory in undergrad and I got really nerdy into it. There’s this book by Carol J. Clover called Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. It’s from the early ‘90s, and it’s the source of that term ‘Final Girl’ as the way it’s conceptualized. She initially pinpointed it as a term or had a collection of analyses of different horror movies and pointed out that it’s something that happens, particularly in slashers. The way that she initially talked about it was this idea of androgyny that’s assigned to a person like Jaime Lee Curtis in Halloween, or Stretch in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2—there’s this relationship to femininity or gender performance that’s complicated or queered in some way.
There’s a lot going on within the slasher genre as far as questioning gender performance or questioning the binary as rigid categories. That’s baked into it. Going through film theory and then my own experiences of seeing more of what’s going on with horror today, and trans/non-binary iterations of horror, at least for me is seeing a space for a trans “Final Girl” or a nonbinary “Final Person.” It feels like in updating that term we can see more of what’s going on than what Clover was talking about a couple decades ago.
It’s interesting seeing what’s coming out today and how that lineage is so connected. There’s maybe an evolution where more films are able to express what was already being quietly expressed in earlier films, too.
That’s something I love. There were more poems that sort of touched on this, but one of my favorite moments in the horror genre is pre-Hays Code horror. Just how gay it is, how trans it is, before that was a term people were using—but then also the ways in which those things were silenced. You can track those lineages [of disappearance] throughout until they resurface in the last couple of decades.
The idea you mentioned—of looking back to when you were a kid and so attracted to horror, thriller and scary-movie genres, but not really knowing why, then coming to understand more of its significance later—that feels very resonant.
Yes. There’s also something about the ways that the monsters in movies—at least Frankenstein—are more telling of the society around them, more demonstrative of misunderstanding or ignorance rather than [the faults of] the monster itself. As kids, I feel like we pick up on that—”Oh no, the monster is not the problem. It’s the people that are mistreating the monster, who made that person into a monster.” And then you can circle back at some point in your twenties and understand more what the movie was about.
This collection plays a lot with form and structure. I liked the burning haibun erasure technique [a poetic style composed of at least three parts—a prose poem, an erasure of that prose poem, and an erasure of the previous erasure to a haiku], in the Geryon poem, and also, content-wise, the poem’s invocation of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.
First, shout-out to poet torrin a. greathouse, as she is the inventor of that form. Grateful to her for bringing them into the world. I became interested in the way that she was using that to talk about lineage or talk about forms of violence. I was interested in incorporating that into the book. And as you mentioned, my initial interest in writing a Geryon poem was Autobiography of Red— which is absolutely fantastic—and [that text] echoes through that poem and some other ones as well. I had an interest in sort of monstrifying Greek mythology. We separate that out [from the horror genre], but really, Medusa is a monster; Icarus is a monster.
There’s so much monstrousness in mythology—whether it’s linked with ambition or chaos or war—there’s a lot of violence. It ties together naturally. What else felt important in your structural choices with the collection?
More broadly with form—something with the way that the book works or moves around, has unusual punctuation. A lot of it comes from a place where I was struck by or trying to work through the idea of needing to trouble language’s relationship to violence. I [was] trying to write against, or to write out of, the patriarchy or the constituent aspects of that—transphobia, homophobia, ableism. Our rhetoric is sort of baked into it, the ways in which normativity or objectivity in our speech is a part of that. One of the things that presented an opportunity to work against that, or conceive of a way of expressing myself or the speaker-self outside of that, was through the form.
That’s why there’s these different things like contrapuntals, which are the form where it’s two poems side by side, but they also make a single unified poem, or moving around using white space—there’s this desire in the poems for multiplicity or fluidity. Something that can create more space, create uncertainty, with something like ‘The Burning Haibun’ as well. This idea of taking a paragraph and reinventing or reconfiguring it multiple ways with this blackout technique is this idea of creating uncertainty—or creating a sense of repetition reincarnating of a poem—that felt more complete or more authentic, or more against the objective of, “This is the poem; the poem is done. I said what I needed to say and did the poem thing.”
What’s your favorite scary movie?
I actually made a zine breaking down queer and trans-coded horror movies that I really love to accompany the book. The most recent one is I Saw the TV Glow. I’ve been thinking a lot about it. For an older one, The Old Dark House, which is a James Whale movie from 1932. He was the director of Frankenstein, but The Old Dark House was lost for 70 years. People didn’t really look at it, it was a commercial failure, but it [became] the inspiration for Rocky Horror Picture Show—the idea of this couple that stumbles into this gloomy mansion at night. All the people in the movie are very dramatic in this wonderful way. It’s pretty gothic-coded. I think it’s really underrated.
What about a slasher?
If I’m going to pick a slasher, I’d do Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. It’s very different than the first one. It was written by the director of Paris, Texas. It’s an art film, but it’s very over the top—there are chainsaw fights. It’s so different than the first one, which is just upsetting. This one is very funny; the cannibal family lives inside of a haunted Six Flags.
Haunted Six Flags is excellent. I enjoyed that in this collection, there are heavy topics you’re addressing—trauma and violence and harmful legislation—but also a fantastic sense of play. Paimon buying plant clippings on Facebook Marketplace, and Icarus’ finsta account. I appreciated the humor throughout, the joyfulness in that.
I think with so much of what we encounter with these big systems—capital “P” patriarchy or homophobia—there is this dread hanging over. But then there are also things that are very mundane or boring or just very funny, that happen alongside that. It felt important to underscore that it isn’t just sad, sad, sad, gloom and doom all the time. I wanted the book to also demonstrate the ways to survive. The ways to find joy, find community, to find this way of connecting with other people. That’s the ultimate goal—obviously it’s confronting the system, but you want to survive that confrontation. You want people to come away understanding what they are fighting for, or why they continue to fight.
That sense felt woven in. In the writing about issues with family members, the speaker of the poems conveyed great care. It felt like a steadily optimistic progression, ultimately about finding and following a path through.
In these confrontations with gender or sexuality or violence, the book is also addressing intergenerational violence and inherited experiences of mental illness. The idea that confronting these things is about wanting to survive—wanting to find or remember what we’re surviving for. I think especially when it comes to [confrontations with] family members—it’s that the point of this is to get better. The point of us working on ourselves—or as the speaker in the poem, unpacking the things that happened to them as a kid or to other people before them—is that it’s done with compassion. It’s this idea of, “We’re speaking about this, we’re working through it in a way where we will be able to be together or be able to have a relationship after this.” That was important to me. It’s less blame, less finger-pointing. It’s not, “This parent or this relative had these issues they didn’t address, and that affected me this way.” Instead, it’s, “We can acknowledge things that happened and work on it. We can try to understand how to get through together.”
Gina Tomaine is a Philadelphia-based writer and editor, and the author of the guidebook for The Philly Tarot Deck. She has written for The Cut, Cosmopolitan, The Boston Globe, Philadelphia Magazine, and the first edition of the Rose Books Reader. Her work has been nominated for an ASME National Magazine award.
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