A review by bisexualbookshelf
Scream / Queen: Poems by C. D. ESKILSON

challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

4.5

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. 

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.
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