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Scream / Queen: Poems
A debut poetry collection drawing on horror-movie tropes to examine the body—both its traumas and its possibilities.
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 “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 the glorious and the monstrous. As a werewolf in the book says, “I kiss the moon; it took so long / to get here.”
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 “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 the glorious and the monstrous. As a werewolf in the book says, “I kiss the moon; it took so long / to get here.”
87 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 19, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 5, 2025
A really strong debut, at its best when discussing legacies & inheritance familial, transcestral, and geographic. I think these themes were more thought out than the stated horror motif, though it was also fun to read about horror films as intertext.
April 12, 2025
I read this collection of poems realizing that, in a lot of ways, I am not the target audience. I am a late-middle age cis het woman. But I am a late middle age cis het woman with a trans stepson, a nonbinary adult child, and people from my late husband’s family who are trans. And I can get into a good horror movie. So maybe I am the target audience.
I definitely could not rush through this slim book. And it deserves to be read again. Reading this, I felt some of the pain, and yea, the joy, of living as someone whose assigned gender does not match their lived reality. And it explores other issues—physical and mental illness and racism and how renaming and deadnaming can be powerful tools to oppress or liberate.
My two favorites-“The Ocean Within Me” and “When Meryl Streep sings ‘Dancing Queen’ in Mamma Mia.”
I definitely could not rush through this slim book. And it deserves to be read again. Reading this, I felt some of the pain, and yea, the joy, of living as someone whose assigned gender does not match their lived reality. And it explores other issues—physical and mental illness and racism and how renaming and deadnaming can be powerful tools to oppress or liberate.
My two favorites-“The Ocean Within Me” and “When Meryl Streep sings ‘Dancing Queen’ in Mamma Mia.”
August 2, 2025
A profound joy to read. Great way to start off my first Sealy Challenge.
April 2, 2025
looove love love!! i got to hear the author read a few of these and they were fantastic!!
March 11, 2025
A wonderful collection of poems that ties transness to horror and back again, brilliantly written and a homage to LGBT+, gender, and womanhood in media.
February 17, 2025
Thank you so much to the author for the gifted eARC! This collection will be published in the US on March 22, 2025 by Acre Books.
Full Rating: 4.5 stars rounded up
C.D. Eskilson’s Scream / Queen is a razor-edged, defiant debut—a collection that howls into the night and reclaims the monstrous with teeth bared and lipstick immaculate. Blending the guttural aesthetics of horror cinema with the raw vulnerability of trans survival, Eskilson crafts poems that stalk the liminal spaces between fear and power, inheritance and resistance. Through the haunted echoes of films like Halloween, The VVitch, and Alien, the collection interrogates the violence inflicted upon trans bodies—both by the world and by the legacies etched into their bloodlines—while insisting on the ecstatic, radical potential of living anyway.
The poems pulse with a language that is at once jagged and lyrical, a body made of barbed wire and open wounds, but also shimmering possibility. Eskilson’s voice twists between fragmentation and fluidity, refusing easy containment. In “On Witchcraft,” gender is an incantation—a spell to summon multiplicity, to carve out space for bodies deemed impossible. “Confession from Medusa’s Head” electrified me with its refusal to apologize, giving voice to a survivor’s anger that is both sharp and righteous. “Intro to Film Theory” bristles against transphobia, unmasking the grotesque scripts imposed upon trans lives, while “Prey: A Gloss” grieves the horror genre’s long history of aligning queerness with monstrosity—then dares to reclaim that monstrosity as strength. And “My Roommate Buffalo Bill” gutted me entirely, transforming a site of transphobic cinematic violence into a space of solidarity and strange, necessary kinship.
Threaded through every piece is the specter of self-destruction—generations of mental illness pressing down like a curse—but also the tender, aching work of refusing to be devoured by it. The speaker claws their way toward a future beyond inherited ruin, rejecting the urge to shrink themselves to fit the world’s cruel gaze. There is rage here, yes, but also a longing to hold a self fully—to stretch, to roar, to coven with others who understand. Ultimately, Scream / Queen insists that the trans body, like any good final girl, is not just something to be feared or pitied—it is something that survives. Something that loves. Something that might, in the moonlight, look a little monstrous—and that is its power.
📖 Recommended For: Readers who crave visceral, genre-bending poetry; lovers of trans-centered narratives and horror media reinterpretations; those drawn to works exploring trauma, survivorhood, and self-reclamation; fans of Franny Choi and torrin a. greathouse.
🔑 Key Themes: Transness and Monstrosity, Intergenerational Trauma and Mental Illness, Gender and Body Autonomy, Survivor Anger and Healing, Queer Kinship and Resistance.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Mental Illness (minor), Self Harm (minor), Transphobia (minor), Medical Content (minor).
Full Rating: 4.5 stars rounded up
C.D. Eskilson’s Scream / Queen is a razor-edged, defiant debut—a collection that howls into the night and reclaims the monstrous with teeth bared and lipstick immaculate. Blending the guttural aesthetics of horror cinema with the raw vulnerability of trans survival, Eskilson crafts poems that stalk the liminal spaces between fear and power, inheritance and resistance. Through the haunted echoes of films like Halloween, The VVitch, and Alien, the collection interrogates the violence inflicted upon trans bodies—both by the world and by the legacies etched into their bloodlines—while insisting on the ecstatic, radical potential of living anyway.
The poems pulse with a language that is at once jagged and lyrical, a body made of barbed wire and open wounds, but also shimmering possibility. Eskilson’s voice twists between fragmentation and fluidity, refusing easy containment. In “On Witchcraft,” gender is an incantation—a spell to summon multiplicity, to carve out space for bodies deemed impossible. “Confession from Medusa’s Head” electrified me with its refusal to apologize, giving voice to a survivor’s anger that is both sharp and righteous. “Intro to Film Theory” bristles against transphobia, unmasking the grotesque scripts imposed upon trans lives, while “Prey: A Gloss” grieves the horror genre’s long history of aligning queerness with monstrosity—then dares to reclaim that monstrosity as strength. And “My Roommate Buffalo Bill” gutted me entirely, transforming a site of transphobic cinematic violence into a space of solidarity and strange, necessary kinship.
Threaded through every piece is the specter of self-destruction—generations of mental illness pressing down like a curse—but also the tender, aching work of refusing to be devoured by it. The speaker claws their way toward a future beyond inherited ruin, rejecting the urge to shrink themselves to fit the world’s cruel gaze. There is rage here, yes, but also a longing to hold a self fully—to stretch, to roar, to coven with others who understand. Ultimately, Scream / Queen insists that the trans body, like any good final girl, is not just something to be feared or pitied—it is something that survives. Something that loves. Something that might, in the moonlight, look a little monstrous—and that is its power.
📖 Recommended For: Readers who crave visceral, genre-bending poetry; lovers of trans-centered narratives and horror media reinterpretations; those drawn to works exploring trauma, survivorhood, and self-reclamation; fans of Franny Choi and torrin a. greathouse.
🔑 Key Themes: Transness and Monstrosity, Intergenerational Trauma and Mental Illness, Gender and Body Autonomy, Survivor Anger and Healing, Queer Kinship and Resistance.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Mental Illness (minor), Self Harm (minor), Transphobia (minor), Medical Content (minor).
April 9, 2025
From my introduction to CD Eskilson's poetry reading at Pitzer College:
In this astute and beautifully crafted book, CD Eskilson asks, “What’s a monster/ but a body deemed impossible?”, anchoring trans and queer personhood in poems that take on the tropes of horror films, familial connections and distances, and the politics of space. Shifting between a desire to disappear and a desire to take up space, these poems explore “learning how to roar” and what it means to seek “a proximity to ruins,” where disturbances open up pathways to freedom. In several of the poems, people change – or at least desire to change – the landscapes that surround them, as in the way “F. walks through forests, filling clearings with their beard” and in the acknowledgement that “I haven’t found a proper way/ to crash yet - / to plunge into a grinning wave,/ to plunge like knife and pluck at thread/ and feel lineage unraveling.” In their poems about horror films in particular, Eskilson offers both astonishing cultural critique and unabashed fandom, reminding us that “there’s risk in our vindictive gore/ but that it offers a resistance.”
These poems expertly deploy a multitude of formal experiments, and they also push the boundaries of syntax, bending nouns into verbs, fusing words into neologisms, etc. Tender, witty, incisive, and complex, CD Eskilson’s poems ask us to imagine language and lives beyond the conventions that have been imposed on us.
In this astute and beautifully crafted book, CD Eskilson asks, “What’s a monster/ but a body deemed impossible?”, anchoring trans and queer personhood in poems that take on the tropes of horror films, familial connections and distances, and the politics of space. Shifting between a desire to disappear and a desire to take up space, these poems explore “learning how to roar” and what it means to seek “a proximity to ruins,” where disturbances open up pathways to freedom. In several of the poems, people change – or at least desire to change – the landscapes that surround them, as in the way “F. walks through forests, filling clearings with their beard” and in the acknowledgement that “I haven’t found a proper way/ to crash yet - / to plunge into a grinning wave,/ to plunge like knife and pluck at thread/ and feel lineage unraveling.” In their poems about horror films in particular, Eskilson offers both astonishing cultural critique and unabashed fandom, reminding us that “there’s risk in our vindictive gore/ but that it offers a resistance.”
These poems expertly deploy a multitude of formal experiments, and they also push the boundaries of syntax, bending nouns into verbs, fusing words into neologisms, etc. Tender, witty, incisive, and complex, CD Eskilson’s poems ask us to imagine language and lives beyond the conventions that have been imposed on us.
January 16, 2026
A collection of poems about identity, queerness, being trans, pop culture (specifically horror films), family, and survival.
from King Ghidorah: "I want to behemoth, be the biggest / violence in the galaxy, smite fear and death. // What i mean is that I want to wield / a smoldered city, have its demolition / be anything I dream: // my memory of prey / gone ruthless, stormblack wings, / my learning how to roar."
from How Are They Picking the Next Halloween Director?: "Next, you're terrifying others: / your coming out's a jump scare, shrieks when / pulling off the mask. You've got experience / with striking fear as an idea, a shape prowling / through reactionary minds. Who claim / you trail them hoe with the trans agenda / when you just live in the same building."
from King Ghidorah: "I want to behemoth, be the biggest / violence in the galaxy, smite fear and death. // What i mean is that I want to wield / a smoldered city, have its demolition / be anything I dream: // my memory of prey / gone ruthless, stormblack wings, / my learning how to roar."
from How Are They Picking the Next Halloween Director?: "Next, you're terrifying others: / your coming out's a jump scare, shrieks when / pulling off the mask. You've got experience / with striking fear as an idea, a shape prowling / through reactionary minds. Who claim / you trail them hoe with the trans agenda / when you just live in the same building."
July 23, 2025
Powerful and wonderful poetry. As a fan of poetry (but not the biggest watcher of horror movies), I was delighted to learn in reading this collection how horror is a useful lens for serious issues in our current moment: identity, self-possession, and our relating to the world.
Often funny, often sad... I would highly recommend Scream/Queen to anyone!
Often funny, often sad... I would highly recommend Scream/Queen to anyone!
March 24, 2025
Solid poetry collection that ties together and examines the relationship between the horror genre and the LGBTQ+ community -- both in celebration and sorrow. It's a breezy 80-ish pages but definitely not a book to breeze through.
October 28, 2025
Enjoyed myself more than I thought as someone who doesnt usually go for poetry. Some poems and verses really resonated and I think this is a great volume for the curious who aren't super poem experienced like me.
April 19, 2025
so captivating and beautiful; very unique
July 23, 2025
Scream/Queen’s horror concept is both playful and powerful... Eskilson makes it clear in their writing that there is more to the stories of all things we are told go bump in the night, redeeming monsters and redirecting horror tropes which have historically demonized trans experiences, while also creating a collection of poems that allows for the celebration of community, love, survival, and self...-Lillian Durr
See the full review at https://www.dogyardmag.com/work/book-...
See the full review at https://www.dogyardmag.com/work/book-...
September 14, 2025
This collection examines the ways in which the world harms, and how the self harms the self. And through that there is a change in narrative, in re-learning of the self, and truth, while claiming joy, and choosing to take up space that one should have always been existing in. It's about living your truth, and loving/healing yourself while you do it. Even if you aren't familiar with the horror genre, you will appreciate this read. Highly recommend!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews