Sam Levy

Cate Peebles’s recent collection, The Haunting, is as much experienced as it is read. The bold stylistic touches and crafty word choices ensure that every theme embodied in the poems is deeply felt, unavoidably so. Each collision of consonants, each fragmentary phrase, causes the reader to mentally stretch and lean, to jump and bend, in the service of piecing together what can be said to lay in the attic of the mind. The poems take their concepts, snap them into their constituent parts, and squeeze them onto the page. What is revealed is a meditation on creation and the body, viewed through the lens of horror, both portrayed as ultimately haunted.

            Some of Peebles’s words crack like whips; others run together in purposefully clunky crashes. They bring to mind the body, earth, magic, ritual. Each has been chosen with a deliberateness that is shocking at times but also a delicacy that is spellbinding. Within Peebles’s poems, the reader must follow along a sort of slip and slide over the words and their sounds, a stream-of-consciousness canter that feels as if it emerges from a somewhat unhinged mind, one with a voice that ranges from crafty and beguiling to bitter and brutal: “The worm is a blip. A / blot. A blood hungry / haunt in love with / harrowing.” The poems’ fragments have a frenzied, fleeting cadence that causes the reader to feel as if they are running to keep up with the speaker. The tension that is created is compounded by the short, punchy phrases like “rigid vein-wrapped femur” and “death’s-head hawkmoth,” which stick out with razor-sharp edges. The overall effect leaves one jostled and gripped, disturbed but also fixated and fascinated.

            The themes in Peebles’s collection are tucked within words and phrases that must be teased out, must be sieved from the rest. What rises to the top is largely a contemplation on the body as a vessel for the act of creation and a consideration of what does or does not carry on in the wake of that act. The poems depict how the corporeal vessel houses the initial and ending process of creation, causing it to ultimately be cyclical in nature: “…I am always a new/ beginning a being/ that ends every/ second…” When the speaker proclaims, “I feel I am reborn blazing…” a fresh cycle of creation begins.

The body is then portrayed as a haunted place, one possessed by the ancestors who have led to the speaker’s own creation. “I am / the haunt…” one poem says, while another questions, “…who then will / my blood/ flow through next…” These poems consider what carries on down the bloodline, what it means to end one, and—in line with the cyclical theme—what it is to begin one again: “All mothers make monsters.”

Another important feature of this collection is the array of poems that take their titles from horror and thriller movies, from Rosemary’s Baby to Vertigo and Suspiria to Picnic at Hanging Rock. In line with the methods used in her other poems, Peebles takes these movies, breaks them down into their most stripped form, and glues them together in gorgeous but unsettling montages. The result is a bare-bones exploration of the themes, imagery, and concepts behind each movie.

The sinister lines in Peebles’s poems provoke goosebumps and shivers while also lending themselves to a sense of enchantment: “painted / bodies falling apart/ to the music of flames and crushed / buttresses above/…” There is a blackness interwoven throughout the text that brings the feminine, horror, the body, and brutality to the forefront of the mind. Taken together, the collection will leave a sour taste in the reader’s mouth, one that may linger long enough to tempt them to go into that darkness. As one line instructs: “put yourself in a / quiet mood/ hum a tune reminiscent of pythons / boiling/ it’s not too late to do something with the rattle.”