Cate Peebles on Her Poems

The best horror breaks down expectations and barriers between the real and unreal–a hand reaching through a wall, a knife in the neck, or a heart beating inside a person’s mouth; boundaries are torn, and binaries erased in ways that terrify but also revive the mundane spaces of everyday life. Poetry and poetic language have the power to do this very well, too, and there’s something about the extra-ness of the horror genre that pairs so well with the poetic impulse to make the familiar strange.

These poems slashed their way out of my re-viewings of horror films that each deal in some way with embodied rage: “Mother Toungue” was written after David Lynch’s short, The Alphabet (1968), and influenced during revison by a rewatch of Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976); and “Revenge Body” is after Masaki Kobayashi’s retelling of Japanese revenge ghost stories in Kwaidan (1964). Like the bodies and spirits in the films, these poems reclaim and possess their own other/worldly forms and are very much at home with terror. In “Revenge Body” I wanted to take that idea completely literally and create a woman whose body is made entirely of knives and sharp objects; she doesn’t need to get cut or ripped, it’s who she is, it’s what she does. “Mother Tongue” is less explicit, but grapples with the fears of naming and speaking, how we’re taught or inherit fear of bodies and what they do naturally, and what we venture to create as a result of the fears we carry around between birth and death.