Scream / Queen

Poems

CD Eskilson

Scream / Queen, CD Eskilson’s debut poetry collection, examines queerness, mental illness, and transgender identity through the lens of thrillers and B movies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Michael Myers, and the Headless Horseman are just a few of the fright-film villains and monsters that populate this book.

Eskilson’s formally innovative poems document how a body—a nonbinary transgender body, a chronically ill body, a body carrying trauma—can be understood, accepted, and healed even in a violent sociopolitical climate. Drawing on the language and images of horror cinema, the poems’ speakers find strength and the means to survive both family legacy and the pain inflicted on them: “I want to behemoth, be the biggest / violence in the galaxy,” says one who thinks about Godzilla and dreams of “learning how to roar.”

Though an atmosphere of trans panic and state legislation against trans bodies pervades the book, Scream / Queen ultimately conjures a world of hope and tenderness through connection and care. It celebrates all the body’s possibilities: the glorious and the monstrous. As a werewolf in the book says, “I kiss the moon; it took so long / to get here.”

Tell others about Scream / Queen.

About the Author

CD Eskilson is a trans nonbinary poet and translator. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright / Academy of American Poets Prize, and their work appears in the Kenyon Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Offing, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. They were once in a punk band.

Photo Credit: Monica Acosta

Praise for Scream / Queen

“In Scream / Queen, CD Eskilson unravels the ciphers of the celluloid closet, using horror as a lens and entry point into poems mapping transness, chronic illness, and familial trauma. These whip-smart, funny, tender, and lyrically inventive poems both pay homage to and critique horror, unwilling to overlook the genre’s entanglement in ongoing moral panics surrounding transness. Though Eskilson stakes the claim that “So much language,” the very building blocks of their craft, “is a hunting ground,” and though this collection orbits a series of personal and historical violences, the beating heart at the core of Eskilson’s poems is love—for the self, their community, family, partner, and for the genre horror itself.”
—torrin a. greathouse, author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound and DEED

“As preluded by the title of their gorgeously written book, CD Eskilson’s Scream / Queen conjures the throaty power of poetry in defiance of “cruelty made quiet.” With deft formal innovation, these tremendous poems are aimed with command and compassion at the realities and the myths that would refuse trans love and liberation, forging new sacred possibilities from their sonic wakes, resolving to claim all the joy owed. As Eskilson says it, ‘I lick my lips,// I kiss the moon: it took so long/ to get here.’ Amen.”
—Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler and One Wild Word Away

“If you’ve survived the unsurvivable, is that enough? Are you also allowed joy, pleasure, contentment even? How much? Scream / Queen dances in the impossible tension of creating a new life while reparenting our current and younger selves. Eskilson’s poems scream in their pauses, silences, surprising variations of form, and sharply-forged verbs. Obstacle after obstacle, from external harm to the ghosts of harm that are intrusive thoughts, the voices of Scream / Queen are languaging their attempts to live in unforgettable sound.”
—K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco