In times of crisis, I find myself turning to strangeness, opacity, unsettledness; we are always in crisis, and so I am always unsettled. I h
Both horror and poetry provide me the same combination of tension and release I find deeply satisfying and also, in many ways, unsettling. I invent a world that is dark, even to me, and as I navigate it, I discover it conceals things that can hurt me. I am compelled, line by line, to seek out the hurt, share in its exquisite effects. My first-beloved horror film, Carrie (1972), did this to me, just as does my now-favorite poet, Kim Hyesoon. Both identify processes fundamental to human bodies — particularly, in this case, to feminized ones — and render them startlingly close and yet distressingly alien. Carrie was the comrade I needed when I started my period; Hyesoon when I was in what some call the “depths” of an eating disorder. The draw of horror/poetics involves a willful, willing return to these depths. Just a visit, a blend of the real and the fantastical: a body, covered in holes, dripping in blood, wielding the power to destroy its enemies the way it has so effectively destroyed itself. In a sociopolitical environment in which trans bodies and Mad bodies (“transMad” bodies, as I tend to stylize them in my work) are understood increasingly both as vectors of contagion and as contagious in and of themselves, I am as invested in reclaiming and reexamining the inherent horror of living in an ableist, transphobic world as I am in reclaiming and reexamining what makes bodily noncompliance so scary to those outside of it. I have found horror in looking in the mirror at a body I don’t recognize, hearing in my head a voice that is not my own, the visceral understanding that I am coming up to the very limits of my own survival. I feel able to look at subjugation frankly in this way, even and especially if what comes out doesn’t “make sense.” Instead, it is a generative nonsense-making, generative in that it makes not sense but space for something else, someone else. That someone is me, and maybe you, too.
