CD Eskilson: On Monstrosity, Possibility and Hope, the Future of Trans Poetics, and Their Debut Poetry Collection ‘Scream / Queen’
The poet CD Eskilson and I first met virtually, as co-editors at the LA-based literary journal Exposition Review. Although we lived in two different continents, I felt drawn to the tender and probing voice in CD’s poetry, as well as to the breadth of their craft knowledge and the acuity of their editorial vision. So when I heard that they were releasing their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025), I immediately knew that I had to get my hands on a copy.
I’m so glad that I did. Scream / Queen is a powerful collection that examines queerness, mental illness, and the poet’s own transgender and nonbinary identity through the lens of iconic horror films—drawing on movie monsters like Creature from the Black Lagoon, Michael Myers, and the Headless Horsemen to tease apart society’s definitions of “monsterhood.” In doing so, it celebrates a queer existence that generously incorporates all of the body’s possibilities, while also offering renewed hope for survival. I felt like reading this book took me on a journey from pain and questioning to full-hearted self-acceptance.
Over a combination of Google Docs and email, CD and I talked about classic horror films, prioritizing mystery over sense-making as poet, and reclaiming the power of monsterhood to exist and thrive as one’s full, undiluted self.
Shze-Hui Tjoa: Hi CD! I want to start off this interview by asking you about the structure of your book.
There are five sections in this collection: “Found / Footage,” “Body / Horror,” “Jump / Scare,” “Para / Normal,” and “Super / Natural.” While reading, I felt a natural arc emerging across these: from emotional volatility and “proximity to ruins” (to borrow a phrase from your opening poem), to a sense of life-giving freedom and even peace, towards the end. I’m especially thinking of the tenderness in one of the last poems, “What I Will Write about My Father,” where the speaker plays with typography to strike out bad memories of their parent’s OCD, while still retaining a visible trace of that past on the page.
Can you tell me more about each of your collection’s five sections? And does the emotional arc I describe resonate with you?
CD Eskilson: Yes! A transformation from emotional rawness and fragmentation to empowerment and tenderness is what I had envisioned shaping the book. Discovering one’s self (or selves, as Scream / Queen also contends) in the face of internal and external harms is the major journey unfolding. By the collection’s end, I would say the poetic speaker even moves beyond discovery to craft themselves into what they want or need to become to thrive in the world.
The sections in Scream / Queen come from tropes or subgenres of horror that emotionally connect to the poems. For instance, “Body / Horror,” which references themes of grotesque mutation like in the films of David Cronenberg, has poems examining chronic illness. Meanwhile, “Jump / Scare” alludes to the abrupt startling technique, and its poems confront experiences of trans panic and violence. This is a less literal connection but emotionally resonant with the rupture or fear in that trope. The style of the titles with the slashes is also meant to interrogate binary modes of thinking. The sections start by dividing distinct words but then bisect single ones, creating an arbitrary division that ignores our understanding of the totality experienced. We often call that gender.
It’s funny you used the term “emotional arc.” That phrase was also rattling around in my head a lot as I was revising and thinking through the poems. It kept giving me pause, though, when I sat with it. An arc approximated the basic gesture I was trying to make as something that unfolds over time, that raises in energy or intensity—but its final drop back to the level of its starting point felt counterproductive. I wanted to write a book whose shape allowed the speaker to sit with the change that has happened—could let more change happen. Eventually, I realized that what I was really outlining with the poems was a logarithmic curve: the model on a graph that’s like a sideways “L.” Its initial rate of change slows, but it never reaches its maximum. There’s always a future to be realized.
ST: That’s lovely. To build on what you said about your use of slashes, I feel like overall, there’s a kind of “Either/Or” or “Both/And” quality that’s foregrounded in your collection. With the title, of course; but also with poems that break up the text into columns like “Trans Panic Contrapunctual” or “I Seance with My Uncle at MacArthur Park”—which lead the reader’s eyes to construct meaning autonomously, by roaming between two sides of the page. And then it’s there thematically too, like in the glorious poem “Trancestor Creation Myth” that describes “The charge to future viewers / to see a body still in progress, in-between.”
Can you talk about why and how the in-between matters to you, as a queer artist and poet? I’m wondering why you bring us back to that space so insistently in this collection—and what you hope your readers will get by staying with you in it.
CE: I would say that the poetic engine I found while writing the book—and by that, I mean the source I derived so much of the project’s urgency from—comes out of a need to trouble language’s relationship to identity. Patriarchy and its constituent components like transphobia, homophobia, ableism, etc., infect the rhetoric that we use and also the way that we express ourselves. It demands normativity, binaries, objectivity from our speech and our writing. If our expression is rooted in those structures, how can we conceive of ourselves, write about ourselves, outside of that violence?
As a trans and nonbinary person, my own gender journey has so often been an exercise in searching for language that didn’t seem to exist, and ultimately needing to create it. I leaned into the mystery of poetry to help language myself beyond the patriarchal demand for “clarity” or “sense” or the need for one answer to things. For me, moments of euphoria and dysphoria have often only made sense to those around me in the realm of simile. For instance, wearing this article of clothing feels like such-and-such physical sensation, being called this name makes me think such-and-such way about myself. Gender discovery is basically crafting a poem.
To write truthfully about who I was in this collection, my poems needed to create a mode of expression rooted in multiplicity, fluidity, and, above all, possibility. I ultimately want to demonstrate to readers that we all possess the agency to find out who we are and craft the selves that we want to become. To chart our own survival in the face of unprecedented violence. While language has been and continues to be wielded as a violent tool of enacting oppression, it also provides a conduit through which possibilities for individual and collective freedom are articulated.
ST: I was really intrigued (and highly entertained!) by the way pop culture met domestic life in your poems. In a number of them we have a TV, film, or mythic character colliding with the relatable mundanities of millennial life: HIM from Powerpuff Girls working as klutzy coffee-shop barista, Icarus taking chaotic glittery finstas of himself in drag, Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs moving in with the speaker and turning into the more glamorous roommate who they kind of wish they could be.
I know that you have ties to Los Angeles, so I wondered if you could speak about how pop culture and mass media influence your craft as a poet. What sorts of creative influences or energy do you draw from TV and film?
CE: In constructing that form of poetics rooted in multiplicity and possibility, I found myself called back to one of my earliest obsessions and the comfort it offered: monsters and horror films. From my earliest memories I’ve been fascinated with creatures and creepy things, how an unsettling encounter or fright scandalizes your preconceived notions. That you come away from a good scare changed in some way. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was my first crush! This reconnection with my childhood passion happened to coincide with the ratcheting up of vilifying queer and trans people we’ve experienced in the last few years. In doomscrolling, I would find the media and commentators spewing vitriol that mirrors the gender panic plotlines of bad ’80s slasher movies. This is how the book’s interest in claiming and recontextualizing monstrosity through the lens of horror media emerged—as a way of taking power back.
Looking critically at horror as an adult at this present moment of demonization, I began to interrogate the category of monsterhood. What are we saying when we call something a “monster?” The word itself is thought to come from the Latin word “monstrare,” meaning “to demonstrate.” In this sense, the monster is quite literally demonstrative—it reveals a deeper truth about a society that unsettles or challenges its dominant narratives.
Because of this, monstrosity has been applied to dehumanize and vilify any perceived Other based on race, gender, ability and other socio-cultural factors. Horror is rife with reactionary messaging and moral panic. At the same time, monsterhood offers a powerful means by which we might reject and work beyond the violence of forces like white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, or heteronormativity. Horror is also full of survival, resistance, and transformation. In this way, the book’s tension between horror as empowering and problematic came into view.
This tension is why horror movies speak to so many that occupy a marginalized space in society. There’s camaraderie in the stories of villains or outsiders haunting the summer camp, the empty street, the house next door. There’s also catharsis on display through the victims: the terror of one’s own desires, the fear of one’s changing body, the dread of trying to survive in a violent world. As a queer and trans person, I found these films to be a lifeline—a means of affirming and understanding myself beyond more sanitized or polite representations of LGBTQ life. In writing poetry so rooted in survival, it felt natural to draw from horror’s radical potential to do that.
ST: I love what you’re saying—about how interrogating and reclaiming the horror of monsterhood (or perhaps the perceived Other, both within and beyond the self) is a source of power in your poetic practice. There’s something so affirming, too, in this vision of a tender and monstrous queer existence that’s not seeking to cleanse itself of its ugly, grotesque, or even vicious sides in order to be “good enough”—but where one is simply content to exist as their full self.
I wonder if you could talk about how this theme of uncovering and acknowledging the monstrous or imperfect thing manifests in your collection, more generally? I’m thinking of how some of your poems engage with hidden histories—uncovering the violently racist past of Bruce’s Beach, for example, or describing the amnesia sustaining the “golden myth” of LA. How do you manage the tension between forgetting and remembering in your work?
CE: I think a key factor in understanding the extent to which structures like white supremacy and patriarchy infect the way we all move through the world is recognizing how central obfuscating past violence is to these projects. For instance, perpetually denying the logistical reality of how a country like the United States has been able to exist—through sustained war and genocide—makes it so past actions lack specific perpetrators. Our understanding of history is so often rendered in a passive voice eschewing accountability, making it easier to apply that same blameless logic to violence today. I think that poetry has a unique ability to confront the past in a way that highlights our obligations to it today, and also allows us to claim agency. A poem is a space where we can connect, speculate and reimagine outside the confines of time or the state.
In writing against this present moment of transphobia, it was critical for me to also engage with broader histories of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. As made clear by scholarly works like C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity or Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny, modern trans and nonbinary identities are historically linked to the binary structures of colonial and racial hierarchies. While poems in Scream / Queen deconstruct gender and sexuality’s confines, I also wanted to highlight that queer and trans liberation is linked to reckoning with broader structures of violence. To me, particularly as a white poet, it was important to grapple with my inherent implication in systems of dispossession and erasure, particularly throughout the past of where I live in Southern California. Reckoning with the unresolved violence of this place’s past offers a path to understanding or surviving our present.
ST: I’d like to build on what you’ve just said, to touch on the way that you close your collection. The very last lines of your acknowledgements section call out to “every trans person who has lived, lives today, and will live” with the words, “I love you. We are holy.” I thought that was extraordinarily beautiful—almost like a benediction or blessing for your whole community, with a palpable spirit of generosity behind it. So I wondered if you could say a little more about your hopes and aspirations for the future of trans poetics—or maybe about what you would like to see more of going forward, in this sphere of writing?
CE: There’s such a rich and beautiful world of contemporary trans and nonbinary poetry! I never cease to be wowed by the writing friends, colleagues and folks I admire have produced. Last year, I was blown away by debut collections like Sissy by Canese Jarboe, A Wellness Check by Bri Gonzalez, Tranz by Spencer Williams, and many others. In 2025, I can’t wait for let the moon wobble by Ally Ang, Still My Father’s Son by Nora Hikari, and more trans and nonbinary debuts!
More broadly, I hope to see more of an effort to amplify trans and nonbinary poets writing from the South. The majority of trans people live in the South. There are so many histories and contemporary acts of radical resistance coming out of southern spaces that offer a lot to us in this present moment of crisis. For generations, queer and trans BIPOC artists in the South have used their work to chart out survival methods and find joy. I am frustrated by a literary landscape that willfully ignores these facts or denigrates those living outside of cities. I hope that contemporary poetry can continue to make it clear to people that trans and nonbinary life exists and thrives in rural or non-urban spaces—that we can thrive anywhere.
Coupled with this, I hope to see literary institutions support their trans and nonbinary writers even when it might become difficult. Since November, we have already seen liberal politicians baselessly scapegoat trans children for electoral losses and abandon any hint of advocacy on our behalf. I want to see folks in the poetry world take a different stand when faced with an atmosphere when violence is increasingly permissible, when it might become more convenient for folks to erase trans and nonbinary poets. I hope to see editors and publishers have the moral conviction to advocate for all vulnerable writers—not only trans and nonbinary folks—in the face of a hostile political and rhetorical climate. Now will be the time to meaningfully show up for one another.
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CD Eskilson is a trans nonbinary poet and translator. Their work appears in the Kenyon Review, The Offing, Cincinnati Review, Passages North, among others, and they are the poetry co-editor at Split Lip Magazine. CD’s debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen, is now available from Acre Books. Once, they were in a punk band.
