The Haunting
Poetry
Tupelo Press, 2025
$19.95, 61 pages ISBN: 978-1-961209-22-0
Cate Peebles’s The Haunting revels in the uncanny and the in-between, tying together classic horror tales with personal vulnerability in poems that examine femininity, motherhood, and the crossroads between life and death. Many of her poems are intentionally derivative, taking their titles directly from the source material being referenced, but this derivation does not hinder Peebles’s originality. While referential, these poems don’t rely on simple plot rehashings; they instead evoke imagery and emotions that give insight into why and how Peebles connects with these works, and asks us to look beyond the plot summary and into something more vulnerable. This emphasis on stitching things together appears throughout The Haunting, both in referential and wholly original poems. The reader is encouraged to examine particular parallels and dichotomies, especially the line between birth and death, and where seeming opposites might actually be woven together.
The Haunting does well to set the scene with its first two poems, “Note Stitched Above the Monster’s Eye” and “Abstract.” “Note Stitched” is particularly brief, consisting of only one line: “Oh, praise – – – my rage – – – . . . ” (3). This opening succinctly promises two things: stitches and rage. Additionally, it opens readers to Peebles’s style of derivation. “Note Stitched” is only the first in a series of similarly-titled poems scattered throughout The Haunting, and are themselves stitched together, being built from fragments of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though the majority of Peebles’s referential works are not centos, and thus are structured quite differently, “Note Stitched Above the Monster’s Eye” establishes how Peebles intends to use existing works: ripping from them her favorite pieces, stitching those fragments together into something new, and imbuing them with pieces of herself in the process.
“Abstract” follows a very different structure from “Note Stitched,” taking the same form as most of The Haunting’s poems: one paragraph, uninterrupted by punctuation, its beats marked by forward slashes attached to the end of words. The prose here is not sourced from any outside material, nor is this particular poem marked as being clearly inspired by any particular work. The title, “Abstract,” first evoked for me the idea of an abstract. Taken this way, I read “Abstract” as a summary of what to expect from the rest of the chapbook. Part of this summary is found in its structure, as it exemplifies the form that most poems in The Haunting will take. But its content also offers a preview of what’s to come, introducing a number of recurring themes and motifs that guided my reading. Some of these I have still not parsed the meaning of (such as the recurrent imagery of horses), but one element of “Abstract” that I find myself coming back to throughout The Haunting is its emphasis on ritual and celebration. The poem begins with a rebirth and a hunt, the thundering imagery of which brings to mind folkloric Wild Hunts. By the end of the poem, this hunt is described as a bridal party exiting an elevator on horseback. The blurring between a hunt and a bridal party, of mythologic ritual and modern reality, signals how Peebles will stitch life and fiction in the rest of her poems. Furthermore, it introduces a key theme across The Haunting: the examination of rituals, and how seemingly disparate practices might actually overlap.
This theme of ritual reappears most clearly in the poem “Bingo of Brides Stripped Bare,” which references Marcel Duchamp’s similarly-titled work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also often called The Large Glass). Presented in the structure of a bingo board, the title encourages readers to connect the words in each square to weddings, but also to consider the aspect of “Stripped Bare.” The poem lacks any of the celebratory language typically associated with weddings, instead opting for phrases that evoke loneliness and rage: “Empty guestbook cellophane”; “A maiden name makes molten gold daggers—”; “Don’t give me away but a way to get even” (7). These are scornful declarations, and ones that create a violent image of marriage. The ritual of a wedding is implicitly tied to that of a funeral in another square, which calls out “a looky-loo’s knotted shroud” (7), drawing a connection between a bride’s white gown and a corpse’s white shroud. The square “Your aorta got shorted—” also plays with perceptions of love and marriage, simultaneously evoking the image of one’s heart skipping a beat at the sight of their lover, as well as the literal skipping of a heart that would result in death. The result is the equation of love and death (at least insofar as the idea that love will eventually die) through the twisting of typical romantic imagery into something wilted and empty. The inspiration from Duchamp’s artwork is clearest in the poem’s first square, which reads “Cracked glass in transit—”, a reference to how The Large Glass was damaged in transit (though Duchamp was happy with the resulting pattern of spidering glass). Peebles’s bingo board otherwise obscures its inspiration, but thematic similarities lie between her scornful prose and Duchamp’s abstract, mechanical visuals. As an analysis from Dr. Lara Kuykendall in her Smarthistory article illuminates, The Large Glass depicts bachelors and bride as living in separate worlds, unable to meet and doomed to never successfully communicate their love, a visual that underscores Peebles’s emphasis on the ultimate futility of love.
Pregnancy/motherhood and miscarriage/loss are some of the other recurring motifs in The Haunting that I found most striking, particularly in how Peebles ties the concepts so tightly together. The first poem where I saw a potential miscarriage/loss narrative was in “Leave Her to Heaven,” which draws inspiration from the 1945 film of the same name. Peebles’s poem has the speaker sitting in a clinic, and while the specifics of why the speaker is there are not explained, the poem’s connection to the film implicitly evokes an image related to pregnancy, as a character is hospitalized after she intentionally induces her own miscarriage. Other poems hint at similar possibilities, such as “The Heiress,” which has the speaker wondering what it means for her identity and personhood if she is not a mother, and “Suspiria,” which contains the striking line “and think of mold/ a growing green skin/ over forgotten milk/ cupped inside my breast” (31), again evoking images of pregnancy tinged with loss and emptiness. I find the most intriguing of these images in “The Brood,” one of my favorite poems in the chapbook, as it mixes together birth, death, and sensuality in a strangely appealing medley of flesh. The poem shifts effortlessly between describing birth as beautiful and violent, and then into panic as the broodmother’s “[hungry larvae] [starve under my folds]” (40, brackets in original). And the scene quickly shifts again, this time into an insectoid orgy, equally disgusting and beautiful. The proximity of sexuality to birth and death feels uncomfortable, though not for the speaker. It’s a fascinating combination of concepts, displaying Peebles’s knack for thinning the boundaries between ideas and weaving them together into one cohesive tapestry. (Or, perhaps, stitching them together into a sympathetically monstrous creation.)
As might be obvious from the titles of many of The Haunting’s poems, Peebles’s work is (as she puts it in a brief but illuminating “Notes” section) “in conversation with” many other works—the majority of which I found myself tragically unfamiliar with. Some titles I recognized as films still sitting on my watchlist, others as films I had seen in full, and still others I did not recognize as previously existing works until they were cited in the chapbook’s notes. The referential nature of these poems creates an interesting effect. At times I found myself frustrated due to my lack of familiarity with the source material, wondering if having experienced a certain film or song might be the key to understanding the underlying message of a poem. What specifics were I missing out on by only knowing the basic concept of Gaslight (1944), or by only reading a plot summary for Kwaidan (1964)? Other readers with similar inclinations toward meaning and understanding (and similar gaps in referential knowledge) might find themselves similarly discontented. But my frustrations and fears were alleviated with the poem “Hereditary,” which illuminated for me the extent to which Peebles’s derivation of other works did not hinder her originality.
Hereditary (2018) is one of the few titles in The Haunting that I am quite familiar with, but in reading Peebles’s poem I doubted that it was meant to reference the film at all. The imagery seemed to evoke something much more personal than referential, so perhaps the title was just a coincidence. But then Peebles’s notes listed Hereditary as one of the many works that she wrote in conversation with. It became clear then that none of these poems are wholly reliant on one’s familiarity with the source material. Instead of one-to-one poetic retellings of these films, Peebles uses outside media as a base for communicating her own poetic vision. They reveal a more vulnerable reality, where Peebles stitches the plot with her own life, creating a work that reflects what these stories evoke for her. The images in “Hereditary” emphasize a child’s connection with the ocean and sea life—a far cry from the demonic cult at the center of Hereditary. But equally centered in the film is a daughter who seems to not fit neatly into the world around her, and the grief surrounding her death that tears a family apart. The ocean images in Peebles’s poem seem disconnected from the visceral terror of the film, but perhaps that loneliness of an unfit child is what ties the two together: “I knew I/ had been born/ when a frozen sea appeared/ . . . I gave birth to a sea cow/ wore inky wool/ and scratched a hole/ in the center/ of my chest where I/ a growling child sat/ drawing eels/ curling shipwrecks around/ my cold wet ear” (36). The lonely, angry feeling of un-belonging screams from Peebles’s words, which emphasize an emptiness and outsider-ness to the speaker. While connections can be drawn to the film, it is evident that Peebles focuses much more on emotion and vulnerability than making simple and easy references. She stitches her existence tightly to the source material here as well as in her other derivative works, sometimes borrowing more thread from her own life, and other times obscuring herself in the film’s plot. In either case, she weaves something wholly new.
This strategy is most obvious in her “Wuthering Heights” and “Note Stitched” series, which create through erasure—a birth through death. Both draw very directly from existing works, using the prose within to stitch together a new poem. This is emphasized in her “Note Stitched” series of poems with the use of dashes that imitate stitches, showing how she has taken Frankenstein fragments and used them to create a new beast. Her pair of “Wuthering Heights” poems emphasize their creation with blank space, as they are erasure poems using Wuthering Heights as their base. The blank space shows how much has been erased in the process of creating something new. Even poems wholly consisting of her own words give the impression of something fragmentary and stuck together. The majority of The Haunting’s poems utilize slashes to communicate beats, another visual that evokes the idea of stitching or pasting things together, which emphasizes the mix of the personal and the referential that each poem contains.
Peebles also makes frequent and interesting use of the em dash throughout The Haunting. The symbol often shows up at the end of sections and poems in place of more standard punctuation. Outside of Peebles’s work, one of the most common ways of using an em dash—at least in my experience—is as a stitch. The previous sentence is perfectly readable without the inserted interruption, but the em dash allows me to bifurcate the thought and place something else inside of it. The other use I find for the em dash is rhythm—creating a break where the reader pauses. I also see the em dash utilized in dialogue quite often, seen at the end to indicate that someone’s sentence has been cut off. I find Peebles’s use of the em dash to combine these most common utilizations. In “Bingo of Brides Stripped Bare,” em dashes are at the end of the phrases in every square except for two: the center square and the bottom-right square. The final square places the em dash at the beginning of its phrase, inviting readers to go back through the bingo board and recontextualize each line by stitching it to the final square. The poem’s emphasis on death and endings also relates to the em dashes, which make the phrases feel cut short until Peebles offers a potential ending in the last square. In “Hush,” em dashes take a similar role as the slashes in Peebles’s other poems, signaling a place to pause as well as imitating a simple stitch to show that seemingly unrelated ideas are being connected into one cohesive piece.
To end, I want to touch on the most elusive and engaging series of poems in The Haunting. “The Worm” is the third poem in the collection, and is followed by scattered continuations all thereafter titled “~”. My inclination with poetry leans toward decoding—I enjoy being able to interpret meaning from a poem, and I often find myself frustrated when I cannot, even if the language is beautiful by itself. The “Worm ~” series bypassed these sensibilities with its employment of raw, visceral imagery. Though I still clung to certain hints toward meaning, I never felt that I fully unraveled what was underneath, and yet this did not interfere with my enjoyment of these poems. The “Worm ~” poems are among those in The Haunting that are (as far as I am aware) not based on any preexisting work, and while I thoroughly enjoyed Peebles’s more derivative works, these poems stood out for how bodily they manage to be. Even the title shifts to reflect the fantastical and invasive nature of the worm, its presence communicated simply by a tilde that imitates its wriggling form. Like “The Brood,” the “Worm ~” poems thread disgust and sensuality so closely that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The worm is distinctly parasitic, but it is still elusive, at times seeming almost gentle, and at others abandoning the speaker after scooping out her insides. The worm seems to me like a bad partner, one whose “tail lives / in another woman’s / body” at the same time that its “head pokes / into the shell-curve of / your cochlea” (9). At other times it seems more an idea or an illness, and perhaps it is all three. Discovering exactly what the worm represents became less important as the series went on, and as I became more and more enamored with the imagery of the speaker’s body. Peebles’s descriptions of the bodily are at once tangible and abstract, combining the language of organic material (with emphasis on organ) with the metaphorical and metaphysical: “The worm mines you. / Consumes interior / offal and firmament / as you sleep” (12). The speaker’s body is described as consisting of entrails, of meat, but also of something as vast and untouchable as the sky. The body becomes something heavenly, almost holy, at the same time that it is still bound to the uncanny inner flesh. This mix of viscera and metaphor continues throughout the “Worm ~” series, drawing one in with its uniquely descriptive depictions of the flesh, at once vile and violent and sensual.
The Haunting occasionally frustrated me in my search for concrete answers, but Peebles’s deft grasp on evocative language reminded me the importance of how a poem feels just as much as what it means. My favorites in the chapbook dealt with the overlap of disgust, violence, and sensuality, as Peebles’s prose easily weaves the three together in stunningly horrific images. I hope to see Peebles continue to explore the body in her works, as she has a particular strength for striking illustrations of the flesh.