Introduction
The last decade has seen the appearance of many poetry collections in Australia and overseas that centre transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) experience, including Billy-Ray Belcourt’s This Wound Is a World (2017), Dan Hogan’s Secret Third Thing (2023), and Rae White’s Exactly As I Am (2022). That such works often feature traumatic themes is unsurprising. TGNC people experience elevated rates of trauma (Colson et al. 558), from social, cultural and political stigma to violence (Sharp 1). But it would be reductive to conflate poetry that represents TGNC experience with trauma testimony. Doing so risks participating in ‘a performance of trauma that reifies trans peoples’ outsider status’ (Schlotterback 269). Some texts, however, represent trauma so forcefully that critical engagement demands an approach in which trauma theory and trans studies intersect.
What Runs Over, the 2017 verse memoir by American poet Kayleb Rae Candrilli, explores the author’s upbringing in a family ruled by an abusive, addict father. It is an account of severe suffering; Candrilli describes the book as ‘all trauma and reclamation of agency’ (Gow). It also charts the emergence of a trans identity, and Candrilli was coming out while writing it (Wood). This essay examines how What Runs Over functions as testimony, and what its formal and rhetorical strategies for representing traumatic thought and behaviour reveal about poetry’s capacity to bear witness. The book’s classification as a verse memoir, a hybrid or ‘trans genre’ (Salah 182) suggests a tension between a narrative impulse and what Candrilli calls lyricism’s attempt ‘to articulate the inarticulable’ (Gow) – between telling what happened and telling what cannot be told; between empirical truth and the ‘human truth’ of the poem which, for Cole Swensen, ‘surpasses fact’ (58). This tension reflects broader debates in autobiography studies around the construction of subjectivity and the possibility of unified subjective truth. More specifically, it asks us to consider the relation between trans poetics, which privileges complexity and flux, and trans autobiography, in which narrative persists as a force that can render the trans subject coherent, integrated, or ‘whole’.
I trace this tension in What Runs Over to a conflict between the urge to disclose trauma and the urge to conceal it. As I have written elsewhere (Villani 2025), experts have long observed such a crisis of language among survivors (Freud; Lifton; Laub); Judith Herman calls it trauma’s ‘central dialectic’ (1). Of course, disclosure – converting trauma into language to share it with others who witness and validate it; integrating it into a broader life narrative – has since Freud been tied to recovery: ‘healing trauma,’ writes Cerankowski in Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming, ‘is in the ability to … endure its telling’ (100). What interests me is how both the resistance and the will to disclosure drives Candrilli’s testimonial process, and how these contradictory forces collide as a poetics in a braid of integrating and disintegrating impulses. Moreover, if ‘using trauma theory to study literature should be a dialogical, two-way process’ (Davis and Meretoja 6), I consider the traumatic torsion of (not) telling in What Runs Over as reflective of how poetry itself unsettles the distinction between what it means to withhold and to reveal.
Within an arc of trauma and survival, Candrilli’s autobiographical candour betrays aporias, omissions, flights of surrealism and formal density, and factual contradictions that seem to break the autobiographical pact (LeJeune 14). As I will argue, Candrilli brings the book’s empirical truth and its emotional truth – the ‘subjective, existential reality’ that Jonathan Culler considers central to lyric discourse (107) – into frequent discord. What such strategies suggest is a careful account of trauma and marginalisation that the author must circumscribe to venture it at all. This conscious urge to circumscribe, born of the urge to disclose, does not stifle testimony, but carries its nuance. Conversely, in literary trauma studies, theorists have typically followed the psychoanalytic/poststructural model of viewing trauma as an experience that bypasses conscious understanding and therefore cannot be known or spoken about directly (Felman; Caruth; Hartman; Luckhurst). Trauma theory analyses of creative texts have focused on aesthetic devices that formally inscribe traumatic symptoms, such as ‘absence, indirection, and repetition’ (Pederson 101). At a time of transition in trauma theory towards methodologies more attentive to relationality (Atkinson; Chan; Kempenaers), my close reading reconsiders such devices against ‘the social components and cultural contexts of traumatic experience’ (Balaev 2). Voiceless at home, erased by the insidious traumas of transphobia and heterosexism, Candrilli struggles to testify – a struggle that drives their poetics – not because they cannot remember their trauma, but because of what Patricia Hill Collins calls ‘a matrix of domination’ (qtd. in Rondot 529).
Catastrophic Secrets
The book’s preface establishes the cruelty to which Candrilli is subjected, trapped with their father in a home – and system of domination – they call ‘the mountain’. It frames What Runs Over as testimony, the goal of which for Susan Brison is to ‘remak[e]’ a self that trauma has ‘disintegrat[ed] or ‘shatter[ed]’ (xi). It also establishes a poetics of narrative disclosure that Candrilli later complicates. In the poem, the family dog’s barking upsets ‘Daddy’, who ‘didn’t ever / like it when dogs did what they do’ (What Runs Over 1). ‘Didn’t ever’ habitualises the father’s reaction; the child knows this anger. Then their father almost murders them:
so when
my dog barked on the back porch
daddy brought a gun
and when he took
aim i jumped in front and when he lifted
the safety i was still right in front
and for minutes
neither of us moved.
This is the book’s most singularly traumatising moment, and its most literal language. The lyrical suspension, which Candrilli heightens through the repetition of ‘in front’ and the unpunctuated conjunctions leading to the assonance of ‘moved’ and ‘do’ carries vital implications. There is the father’s willingness to train a gun on his child. Also horrific, however, is that this brinkmanship represents one of only two scenes in which Candrilli and Daddy face each other or show mercy. Here is the second:
I hold a dulled machete over my daddy when he sleeps.
He opens his eyes and says nothing, goes back
to bed. He doubts my conviction. I know,
because that’s what he says in the morning. (18)
Nowhere else does Candrilli threaten violence against their father. Not only does this moment mirror the opening, but the blunted machete and banal exchange – which Candrilli’s prosaic, end-stopped lines accentuate – highlight Candrilli’s helplessness before ‘Daddy-God’ (85). Closeness with Daddy, for Candrilli, occupies the space between the desire to kill him and the threat of his killing them. Such a traumatic intimacy creates an aporia, as the preface’s final stanzas make clear:
my daddy almost pumped me full
of lead. my daddy almost left me
for
so ask me why i hate animals
and i’ll answer with a trigger warning.
i’ll say *your dog *
reminds me of daddy (1)
Why does Candrilli hate animals? If dogs remind them of almost being murdered, would they not also symbolise the innocence they deemed worth saving, and the courage required to defy Daddy’s barbarism? One answer depends on the pun in ‘trigger warning’. The ‘trigger’ suggests Candrilli’s traumatic response to a scene – meeting a dog – that echoes this near-death encounter, a typical example of the tendency to reexperience or ‘repeat’ trauma that Freud first identified, and which remains central to the diagnostic criteria for PTSD (American Psychiatric Association). Another reading, however, installs Candrilli as the trigger, metonymic for the capacity to inflict violence: ‘your dog / reminds me of daddy’ recalls the depths of Daddy’s influence on Candrilli, conditioned to hate the animals they would protect with their life. Candrilli is a victim-perpetrator. However, this judgement is false: Candrilli is an innocent child. If a trans identity inherently contains ‘splits in plot’ in a transphobic world (Prosser 121), Candrilli suffers the added ‘splitting’ that follows abuse.
What Runs Over, then, begins with violence. We cannot read the rest of the book except through this trauma. It is therefore conspicuous that the first poem in the book itself – the preface is interleaved – begins: ‘If you live on top / of a mountain, things hit you / in migratory waves: / ravens…’ (5). With the enjambment after ‘you’ Candrilli’s poetics swerves. These ‘waves’ of impact recall the preface, but indirectly, through natural imagery. For the remainder of What Runs Over, Candrilli does not depict any direct acts of violence by their father towards them. The menace of this violence suffuses the collection, yet Candrilli eschews direct, narrative treatment in favour of poetry’s connotative devices. Maurice Blanchot argues that poetry’s most essential task is that of ‘naming the possible, responding to the impossible’ (Infinite Conversation 48, italics in original), a formulation that suggests the forces of plurality and fragmentation that shadow any poetic attempt to impose measure and form. Trans poetics, too, often ‘navigate(s) the limits of the (im)possible’ – a historically othered, unreadable, body (Edwards 252). Daddy’s brutality towards his child, overt in the preface, becomes one such limit: too shattering to face for long, but atomised into the book itself, which never stops responding to it.
We might call this abuse the book’s traumatic secret, ‘a catastrophic knowledge that [a writer] cannot communicate to others’ (Ronell 315). But it is an open secret: already revealed and so rhetorical, active in what Candrilli does tell us. Depictions of hunting and animal cruelty, for example, transpose Daddy’s abuse onto other victims. Daddy’s first words to Candrilli in the book are ‘Unzip the fucker. Skin it fast. / Split its lips’ (15). These imperatives for taxidermising a bear are intricate – ‘Kneeling on the inside of its skin, scrape with a putty knife’ (16) – as though the father is taking care to teach the correct method. They also degrade the animal, and evince moral, and perhaps sexual, dereliction: ‘Spit on its carcass as it burns.’; ‘Hang the fucker from the banister’ (16). Daddy issues commands, and his family must obey. When Candrilli describes having seen ‘bears, bobcats, and lions’ on the mountain, they add that ‘daddy was always taking shots / out the window / exploding them / to rorschach’ (66). Candrilli is the patient interpreting these wanton killings. They are also the clinician decoding what they see, as a measure of their attitude towards violence, which is a measure –the only measure Daddy permits – of what it means to be masculine. How does Candrilli interpret themself, their gender identity, if masculinity entails ‘exploding’ into perpetration?
Towards the end of the book, a poem about a fishing trip depicts a man out of control:
The fish we caught were doomed cause Daddy didn’t believe in catch
and release so he cut their heads off with the cleaver he carried. Butcher-Daddy
topped the food chain…
…
…
…
Daddy couldn’t stop himself, so he shot the turkey vultures that came
for those kaleidoscoping fish heads. Daddy never wanted to stop
so he noosed those birds by their long necks and cut the throats
of the bears that pawed their tar-feathered corpses. (84)
‘Daddy-God’ (85) is ‘Butcher-Daddy’ (84): the long lines and run-on sentences reflect a helpless Candrilli watching this frenzy in horror. As the parallel syntax affirms, one death begets another in a murderous chain. Not only is Candrilli’s life almost a link on the chain, but they also obsess over the extent to which they perpetuate this cycle. Perhaps the most crucial poem in which Candrilli reflects on witnessing their father’s sadism concerns another dog. The poem begins: ‘daddy played chicken with the neighbor’s dog / because he didn’t like the way it barked’ (62). In an echo of the preface, Daddy ‘ran that dog down three times / with me in the passenger seat / he crush-maimed it / he crush-maimed it / he crush-maimed it’. This repeated running-over becomes the book’s moral hinge.
One of the most traumatic aspects of What Runs Over is the extent to which Candrilli feels branded by the abuse they suffer, responsible for it, evil, struggling to break free from such conditioning at the same time as they move towards a more masculinised gender identity that Daddy has bound up in cruelty. Candrilli renders this conflict primarily through the motif of fire. Scanning the area around their home for lightning fires, Candrilli admits that ‘[e]ach time a house / goes up in flames I wonder / if my daddy lit the match and blew / fire, drought in the back / of his throat, kindling / tongue, gasoline / on his breath’ (12). That Daddy does not simply start fires, but breathes them, implies an intrinsic violence. It courses through him: Candrilli’s mother ‘shot fire drugs into daddy’ (54). Climactically, Daddy’s attempts to ‘crush-maim’ the neighbour’s dog precede a conflagration:
and then daddy’d get mad when the dog
got better, get mad when the dog
barked the same as it had before.
that neighbor’s house burnt down
eventually, all the way to cinder block
foundation and that fire took the dog down
with it. daddy laughed from the driver’s seat
and the back of his throat smelled
of dirt roads and spent matches. (62)
The dog’s resistance, Candrilli suggests, justifies not mercy, but more total annihilation.
If Daddy’s fire is innate, however, Candrilli’s trauma manifests in part as recognising this force in themself. An early poem begins: ‘My daddy’s addiction / comes to me in a dream’ (9). In this dream, ‘[f]ire beneath my skin tattoos / from the inside out, purple- / green flames lick through the maps / of my veins’ (9). The possibility that Candrilli’s father’s addiction has branded his child haunts them. Further, by enjambing the second line at ‘purple’, Candrilli foreshadows a late poem in which they declare that ‘my violent body / is just a purple / reaction’ (71). Nowhere else does Candrilli explicitly connect the violence they experience and the violence they perpetrate. We see this transmission of violence in a vital prolepsis. Stacking ‘firewood for daddy’, Candrilli
imagined God had watched me
rub sticks together until I caught
a spark in my hand, then he laughed
so hard the fireball got blown,
&
bounced down the road setting
fire to the neighbor’s house.
They lost their dog and
it was God’s fault. (25/26)
Is God ‘Daddy-God’? In any case, while God may cause the dog’s death, Candrilli enables Him. Candrilli hints at such complicity when a pool house burns down and they recall ‘all those lane dividers browned like marshmallows / over a fire I was taught to start’ (22).
This learned pyromania points, perhaps, to a more anterior destructiveness: Candrilli’s queerness and gender variance, which fire also symbolises in the book. I should stress that Candrilli does not overtly attribute their father’s violence towards them to homophobic or transphobic hatred. But Candrilli hints at it through heterosexist stigma they suffer in the community; one poem depicts Candrilli’s mother watching a children’s game, ‘drum[ming] her fingers / with anxiety because [she] is / the mother of a dyke that wants to / fuck the other mother’s daughters’ (44). While other mothers blame Candrilli’s mother, considering her ‘the devil,’ Candrilli clarifies that ‘it’s really my arms that pitchfork at / each end, the way I burn…’. Szymanski et al. and Colson et al. note that heterosexism can exacerbate trauma, and we must add this to the factors that lead Candrilli to demonise themself. Discussing their grandmother’s lucrative personal injury lawsuit, they pause: ‘But I’m, not supposed to write / about all that’ (30). Read against this open omission, Candrilli’s lack of reference to how their gender and sexuality impacts their home life feels, however deliberately, charged with the inarticulable. It becomes a lack that ‘runs over’ into interpretative excess. What is more, it throws what Candrilli does disclose into sharper relief.
Returning as Overcoming
In an interview, Candrilli remarks that until their twenties ‘there was absolutely no agency that I was able to wield’ (Boutris). What Runs Over depicts a child without a voice. Candrilli has no friends. Their heterosexist community scorns them. Their trans body is, culturally and politically, ‘unspeakable’ (Prosser 4). However, the book does represent agency – and possible addressees to witness and validate testimony – via sexual intimacy, particularly BDSM. This intimacy surmounts earlier violence by repeating it. Intercourse speaks like trauma: Candrilli and a lover would ‘fuck each other / sopping and hum / through box fans to cool / the burn in the backs / of our throats’ (33). If the back of Daddy’s throat smells ‘of dirt roads and spent matches’ (62), a similar burn afflicts Candrilli, which sexual intimacy causes and quells. Moreover, sex resembles hunting. It often draws blood, both Candrilli’s and their lovers’: ‘in the beginning / i reached / my hand / between / the legs / of a woman / … / and she came / bloodstream / rhinestones / into my palm’ (8). Candrilli explicates the connection between hunting and the desire to inflict and endure amorous pain in a poem that recalls their father holding the heart of the ‘first buck’ they killed:
& i said wow/because… /i had never made something bleed/quite like that
//
not until i fucked/the first girl-woman/in the shower/& the first blood/
turned to peppermint/swirl in my palm/& the water ran/it away forever
//
& i said wow/because i had never made someone/bleed quite like that…(38)
Like the concourse between hunter and prey, Candrilli views the spilled lover’s blood with awe. When enacted in love, however, this blood rite is non-fatal: Candrilli makes their lover bleed ‘just to bite / a thank you into my ear’ (38). This subtle shift, which the parallel syntax stresses, performs a ‘retelling’ and ‘remastering’ of trauma (Brison 58).
Candrilli’s descriptions of sadomasochism carry more ambiguous implications. Most emblematically, ‘Daddy’ ripples with its dual meaning as a term for a father and a dominant sexual partner. Referring to shibari in the book’s most visually fragmented poem, suggesting an ecstatic fracturing of self, Candrilli directs their lover to ‘punish me in rope work. /…let me hang upside down for half the year’; ‘And you understand’, they add, ‘that I will ask you to do unspeakable things’ (73). This demand to be hung up echoes Daddy’s instruction to ‘[h]ang’ a killed bear ‘from the banister’ (16). The desire to be treated like their father’s hunting kills epitomises the traumatic framework of intimacy that governs Candrilli’s relationship with Daddy. At another level, Candrilli’s ‘lycanthropy’ (79) substitutes them for the dog their father runs over. Beside the poem in which Candrilli recalls their father’s having ‘crush-maimed’ the neighbour’s dog and potentially lit the housefire that kills it (62), the poet writes:
let’s imagine that as an
adult
my spine is a road
broken
line
passing
lane
vertebrae
& i beg to be run over
& the one who drives
drives me with a flogger—
their hot new whip (63)
Candrilli is not positing their body as roadkill, but the road itself. If to drive a road is to run over it, such violence is banal. Roads ‘beg to be run over’. That Candrilli equates this running-over with sadomasochism, however, indicates a desire for repeated pain, an animal reduced to roadkill reduced to road, which evokes their father’s brutality towards the neighbour’s dog. This substitution becomes clear in the next poem:
put a collar on me
and I’ll bark
or hang myself
from your belt loop
to become
your animal
is to become
less and at the same time
more
Having witnessed their father ‘crush-maim’ a dog, having almost given their life for another dog, Candrilli commands a lover to transform them into a dog. Clear in this imperative is a shift from powerlessness to power, a show of dominance as submission, an exercise of agency in commanding a lover to strip them of it. Such a (consensual) devolution reduces their moral status, allows them to be ‘run over’. Yet this also allows them to ‘run over,’ transcend, what they have been: a person in bondage, whom a transphobic and homophobic society has dehumanised and whose conception of loving intimacy originates in risk. Candrilli describes the book as being about ‘[r]unning over, running off, running out’ (Trott).
Given the juxtaposition Candrilli establishes between sexual intimacy and Daddy’s violence, it is not surprising that the book’s most overtly traumatic statement since the preface should bring this juxtaposition to its most consequential and ambiguous point. The trans author Cerankowski, reflecting on his interests in sadomasochism, asks: ‘Do I pay someone to beat me because it feels like the love of my father?’ (66). Candrilli, similarly, writes:
The fact that my father beat me has nothing to do with the fact that my ex-
lover did, that my lover does.
The fact that my father beat me has nothing to do with the fact that my ex-
lover did, that my lover does.
The fact that my father beat me has nothing to do with the fact that my ex-
lover did, that my lover does.
Each smack is singular.
Each fist is something new.
If I count the reasons in order:
Zero.
Infidelity.
Begging for it.
On my knees for it. (70)
The repetitions land like blows. Candrilli reveals that they have withheld Daddy’s abuse from a narrative obsessed with his cruelty. Interestingly, other recent lyric works by trans authors recounting childhood, by Cerankowski and Shipley, also feature physically abusive fathers. Yet Candrilli declines to tell us more. In contrast to psychoanalytic trauma-theory analyses – for example, by Felman, Hartman, and Kaladjian – that focus on poetry’s capacity to formally evoke trauma that the survivor cannot fully remember or know, the refusal that Candrilli here makes ‘fact’ is considered, rhetorical. The trauma theorist Cathy Caruth warns that ‘the transformation of trauma into narrative memory … may lose both the precision and the force that characterises traumatic recall’ (153). Caruth’s statement implies that only a fragmentary aesthetics can reify trauma in language. Many critics consider this claim one of trauma theory’s most problematic in its tendency to narrow the field’s reading practices (Tracy; Craps). Yet if trauma’s central dialectic is the conflict between disclosing and concealing horrific experiences, Candrilli’s admission – also a redaction – evinces another vital dimension of trauma: survivors’ ‘compulsive outpouring of attempts to formulate narrative knowledge’ (Luckhurst 83). What Candrilli shows us is the testimonial process as a braid of integrating and disintegrating impulses. For Blanchot, this torsion characterises poetry itself: poetry ‘turns toward that from which it turns away’ (Infinite Conversation 32). To tell their story, despite its grounding in clear memory, Candrilli must omit, withdraw, redact, transfigure it.
By admitting that the beatings occurred, Candrilli further laces scenes depicting animal cruelty with possible abuse. What is more, Candrilli’s use of the verb ‘beat’ to describe both their father’s and their lovers’ violence conflates trauma and consensual sexual play. The thrice-repeated statement reads as an attempt to deny an undeniable – perhaps unsayable – chain of causation between childhood and adulthood suffering. Ironically, the negation affirms an intolerable truth, which Candrilli tries to gainsay by declaring that ‘each fist is something new’. The lines attempt to bring an alternate reality into being, just as testimony performs the recovery it describes. Cerankowski writes of his own interest in BDSM and its connection to his childhood of beatings and transphobia: ‘I am trying to reclaim my body that had been stolen through pain. The pleasure produced from the pain cannot be separated from the trauma to which it is connected’ (83). Candrilli, likewise, substitutes one bondage for another. Does this return abreact or master trauma, or resubmit to it? It does both – and ‘running over,’ for Candrilli, means running this risk.
Form, Inaccuracy and Emotional Truth
For Ulrich Baer, ‘the question raised by both trauma and poetry is how to expose ourselves to an experience that is defined by its absolute singularity and inaccessibility’ (13). If the survivor must make some of this ‘singular’ experience shareable as testimony, poetry too, Baer argues, ‘reaches for another’s understanding while maintaining its own radical individuation’ (12). Poetry, like trauma, simultaneously discloses and conceals. The poems I have discussed so far, despite their visual fragmentation and non-linear sequencing across the book, have featured fairly conventional, narrative storytelling. But Candrilli interrupts such storytelling with formal density, dream logic and surrealism, and factual inconsistencies. What Runs Over’s testimony depends on an interplay of clarity and opacity, empirical truth and emotional truth. This interplay evinces trauma’s central dialectic; it also embodies trans poetics, which, Joy Ladin argues, aims to communicate the ‘unstable relations between body and soul, social self and psyche’ that gender variant people ‘endure … and exult … in’ (97).
An early poem begins: ‘Anything can be stolen. / Semantics. / Klepto. Clepto. Kalypso. Calypso. / Maniac. Is what I was, / what they called me’ (11). As the etymology of ‘calypso’ – hidden, or concealed (Etymonline) – suggests, these lines resist interpretation. Is Candrilli a secret kleptomaniac? Are they a ‘calypso-maniac’ who obsessively keeps things hidden, or exhibits secret maniacal behaviour? These lines grow more equivocal compared to the narrativised opening of the next poem: ‘We spend the years on the mountain periscoping / in pine trees for flumes of smoke’ (12). This formal juxtaposition implies that Candrilli may withdraw narrative clarity at any time. We seem to be oscillating between modes of discourse: one governed by historical fact; one revealing ‘that reality which the lyric I signifies as being its, that subjective, existential reality which cannot be compared with any objective reality which might form the semantic nucleus of its statements’ (Culler 107, emphasis in original). This is the logic of the poem, which ‘does not attempt to replicate or represent th[e] world in an accountable way’ and so is ‘itself a true act’ (Swensen 54). Such logic is not incompatible with autobiographical discourse, whose ‘allegiance to truth’, Eakin writes, is ‘an allegiance to remembered consciousness and its unending succession of identity states’ (37). Rather, it voices the ‘phenomenological chaos’ (Douglas and Vogler 46) of a traumatised subject stripped of agency by abuse and the insidious violence of existing in a heterosexist, transphobic world.
Often, Candrilli’s endings fray narrative coherence. ‘Velvet grows on antlers’ they write to open one poem. ‘It grows there like moss, like ivy creeping up a wall’ (36). These velveteen antlers may symbolise a feminised element of an emblem of masculine virility. At the end, however, we find: ‘Velvet grows on queen’s skin. I shave it and sell it to black market queers because / I am a commodity: / Buck out of season. / Buck in rut. / Cock in cunt’. In addition to their formal departure – nowhere else does Candrilli use dimeter, end-stopped lines – these lines become fantastical. Is Candrilli admitting to shaving the ‘velvet’ off their own skin and selling a part of themself, hidden in a body assigned female at birth, a ‘cock in cunt’, sexually to ‘black market queers’ – perhaps closeted people who desire a queer life? Does this transaction symbolise a confident expression of gender variance? For Rowland, poetry’s disruption of narrative continuity is one of its means of voicing ‘baffling experiences of suffering’ (5). It would be more correct to say of Candrilli that they alternately withdraw and establish such continuity. As emotional truth, this visceral sequence evokes a relation to gender that feels both liberated and shameful, which the harsh alliteration and consonance intensifies.
Candrilli also interpolates literal, narrative poems with surreal details, suggesting both traumatic dissociation and the lyric’s transformative power. These details are often gruesome, echoing the violence of the hunt to blur cruelty and care. For instance, they recall that ‘[w]hen the surgeon ripped me / open, she said she’d cut / the hate out. She said it ran / like a rope along my groin. She said it was coming / for my cunt’ (57). Emotional truth supplants empirical accuracy in this graphic evocation of transphobia. In what may be a dream, an authority figure brands Candrilli’s gender an act of hate, as if to have a ‘cunt’ and not identify as female were a brutality visited upon the self, not to mention the cultural gender binary. In contrast, two poems use hunting by-products to depict a subject attempting to transmute powerlessness into power. The first is about Autumn:
By Halloween all we smelled was apple cider
and burning bark. The vat of cider boiled
from October on and my mother would toss
in citruses, cranberries, cinnamon sticks. I’d contribute
ears: deer, fox, coyote. Sometimes their whole faces, ripped
into masks. Sometimes my own… (59)
Candrilli poisons a family ritual seemingly with their mother’s permission. This despoiling suggests their mother’s inability to leave their father. But in a later poem, Candrilli exchanges the vat for a caldron into which they stir ‘beaks of turkey and grouse, the liver of a dawn dad-/dy killed out of season’ (83). Candrilli offers the brew to their mother, promising her that ‘it will invisible us, it will make daddy wonder / where we’ve gone to’. Such witchery suggests a child inhabiting an imaginary world where they have the power to alter reality and reclaim control. And the spell works: the concoction ‘acid tore through each floor and me / and mommy lava jumped through the living room / right before the whole damn house burnt down / with daddy still in it’ (83). In an interview, Candrilli admits that ‘[t]here is no lava in rural Pennsylvania, but there is heroin addiction, and domestic abuse, and an undying desire to escape’ (Wood). A core aspect of the lyric is its optative impulse, premised on ‘the possibility of magical transformation’ (Culler 216). This surreal sequence makes the imagination – and the poem – a cauldron where change, escape, becomes manifest.
The housefire is not the only time that Candrilli’s father dies. Another poem begins:
the 911 operator asks me the riddle of the
sphinx / i recite my address and imagine
lights strobing across mist-blue pyramids
/ appalachia in twilight / how many ways
can you slice history / watch its arteries
spill reds in the bathtub / my father dies
this way / his urned ashes already tickle my
nose / i have no imagination but foresight (46)
As the assonantal and consonantal patterns, slashes, and taut enjambments dramatise, the stanza is traumatic: a child has found their father dead. These details feel remembered, and they are: Candrilli describes What Runs Over as ‘just memory’ (Trott). Yet what does Candrilli mean when they ask ‘how many ways / can you slice history’? To slice is to wound; it is also to divide, apportion, re-present. How many ways can one do violence to history – in this case, the history of Candrilli’s relationship with their father – by reinterpreting, altering it? Why might someone slice history in this way? On the next page, Candrilli writes that ‘[w]hen my daddy caught his cold, it lasted / forever. He never left his bed’ (47). Is ‘forever’ here hyperbole, or is this an alternate death? How, then, near the end of the book, should we interpret these lines: ‘my daddy who art / in the hawaiian / islands and neck / deep in his own / neurosis stole my sister’ (89)? In the world of the book, Daddy is dead and alive. ‘Autobiography does not include degrees,’ writes LeJeune. ‘It is all or nothing’ (13). That Candrilli leaves multiple versions of their history operative frustrates LeJeune’s autobiographical pact, our ability to map the life on the page onto that of the author. However, this ignores LeJeune’s ‘referential pact’: that, in any autobiography, truth is always ‘the truth such as it appears’ to its author (22). In Candrilli’s case, the ‘subjective reality’ of the traumatised subject carries a truth value far beyond that of their father’s biographical fate. Candrilli’s testimony balances individuation and address: ‘all the omission, the redactions, the … surrealism,’ they admit, ‘is how all of this trauma can live inside of me without consuming all the good stuff’ (Trott). It is not that the book dispenses with empirical truth. It is that such truth must accommodate the ‘emotive’ aspect of both poetic testimony and the lyric in general, a space governed by what can and cannot be said, a ‘space that need not be repressed behind the supposed objectivity of testimonial facts’ (Rowland 4–5).
Transitioning as Survival
Judith Butler writes that ‘we come to exist … in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails’ (130). Candrilli locates this failure of address in their father’s brutality, but also in heterosexist stigma, and misgendering: ‘i screamed undress me from that dress’ (21). As Colson et al. note, ‘chronic misgendering has damaging psychological impacts, such as feelings of self-doubt, self-loathing, shame, dysphoria, helplessness, powerlessness, anger, and emotional pain’ (558). To misgender is to fail to address. The reclamation of one’s gender identity, then, has the potential to alleviate traumatic suffering and foster recovery. If testimony is a ‘process of putting fragments together, creating a whole’ (Laub 187), Candrilli’s transition, a literal ‘remak[ing] of personhood’ (Brison xi), becomes the book’s primary expression of survival. In this way, What Runs Over bears traits of what Gratzke terms ‘mainstream trans narratives’ which ‘aim to give a coherent and comprehensive account of the author’s life structured by transition events in context’ (15). Yet the book also bears traits of Gratzke’s ‘queer-themed approaches', which, in contrast to mainstream trans narratives’ traditional framing of gender, ‘write new scripts expressed in genderqueer epistemologies, terminologies, and communities’ (16). How Candrilli straddles these approaches offers insights into the persistent appeal of narrative coherence in trans autobiography, particularly when such writing involves trauma testimony.
Candrilli, as mentioned, does not disclose their family’s – most conspicuously, their father’s – position on their sexuality or gender. Like the motifs of animal cruelty and fire for Daddy’s violence, Candrilli renders their protean identity largely symbolically. ‘After rain’, Candrilli writes, ‘there was always fire / newts everywhere…/ Amphibious and useless’ (6). Newts can survive in both land and water, fit uneasily into either category. Yet if Ladin uses the image of a ‘bullfrog thrum[ming] amphibious hymns’ (16) to symbolise an ideal, trans-inclusive space, Candrilli deems newts ‘useless’ for this hybridity. The adjacent poem offers their first account of a sexual experience, at their sister’s dance competitions: ‘I grew older and hid / in other women’s hotel / rooms, let / a rival choreographer / … / …push / her breasts into my mouth’ (7). Candrilli’s category-defying identity makes their body ‘evil’ (76), their sexuality a menace, ‘hate’ to ‘cut out’.
Candrilli’s desire to transition becomes manifest in a crucial poem:
outside, garter snakes mate orgiastic
and male snakes gender switch
they hide from hawks this way my envy
takes flame and burns their scales (21)
‘[I] want to be a snake’, Candrilli declares later, ‘i want to be born again’. One implication is that Candrilli envies the male snakes’ ability to evade predators by ‘gender switch[ing]’. Candrilli’s primary predator, of course, is their father. At any rate, their desire to transition predates suggestions of abuse. In one poem, Candrilli writes: ‘the t-ball team blonde boy hits homeruns / and his aluminium baseball bat cracks my baby / clitoris open’ (39). This injury prompts Candrilli to ‘dream bodies naked’. They dream of their own clitoris, but also ‘look for blonde boy’s too’, and find it: ‘his clit is red white flame flare / dot of blood’. In the dream, ‘our bodies are made of mirror’; the boy ‘becomes…something woman’, which suggests that they may become something other than ‘woman’. In another poem, Candrilli pursues this transformation in part through letting boys use them sexually: ‘i want to eat them wholly / and wake up as what I eat’ (78). In this fantasy, identifying with the aggressor reaches its zenith – consuming and becoming them. Such an impulse contrasts with Candrilli’s refusal to ingest ‘Daddy-God[‘s]’ influence: ‘I’ve never drunk all of the promised land at once’ (85). Throughout Candrilli’s poems of early childhood, the social injunction on their desire renders it private, surreal, fraught. Evoking it requires a lyric, emotive space – a trans poetics.
Life writing scholars have long critiqued the notion of a fixed self and the Western, exclusionary epistemology it centralises (Smith and Watson 153). Social constructivist and poststructural theory has eroded traditional distinctions between autobiography as ‘truth’ and fiction (or poetry) as ‘imagination’ (Schmidt 47). In trans autobiography, for Gratzke, mainstream narratives that posit a clearly defined and resolvable gender transition – such as from female to male, through medical procedures – risk reifying the gender binary, and cannot account for the breadth of trans experience (15). For Horvat, similarly, trans life writing’s interest in formal experimentation reflects a wariness of ‘auto-biographical expression, attributable to close ties to the medical gaze and cis-gender reader curiosity’ (408). The sociologist Ruth Pearce advocates a shift from discourses of ‘trans as condition’, which rely on rigid – and usually binary – medical or social criteria, towards discourses of ‘trans as process’, which ‘recognise the potentiality and actuality of changes to theory, subjectivity, embodiment, space and time taking place through continual creation, fluidity and world-building’ (8). Recent memoirs by trans authors, such as Akwaeki Emezi’s Dear Senthuran, embody this shift from condition to movement, undoing binaries and recasting personhood in more open, plural, contingent, relational terms.
However, despite the critical and aesthetic headwinds, autobiography continues to be a space where some trans authors narrativise a ‘stable and coherent sense of self’ (Schlotterback 269). Candrilli, I think, does for so two interrelated, yet separate reasons. One is trauma, which ‘disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence’ (LaCapra 41). Yet transness, too, all too often entails ‘a body narrative in pieces’ (Prosser 121). One consequence of this effect, as with any wound, is that it is always ‘entangled with its possible healing and overcoming’ (Miller vii). This fact has received little attention in trauma studies, whose focus on formally inscribed traumatic symptoms has been accused of ‘aestheticis[ing] actual powerlessness’ (De Graef et al 252). What Runs Over, despite its aporias, describes – and enacts – recovery in the form of Candrilli’s gender transition (which, I should stress, disavows the gender binary and therefore also functions as a queer-themed approach in Gratzke’s formulation). In a critical poem, they write: ‘what if, somewhere in the course / of this story, i rename myself? / what if I say, now call me kayleb?’ (74). As Kayleb, Candrilli discovers a capacity for self-love: ‘what if i said that god told me / to look for the promised land / & i fingered myself’ (74); ‘it can’t be sacrilege / if i’m devout, at least to myself’ (74). To be ‘devout’ to the self, of course, is also to enter the project of ‘redeem[ing] or remak[ing] the self’ (Izenberg 15) typical of the post-Romantic lyric. In poetry, too, as Gillian White has noted, the ideal of an authentic, unified, ahistorical subjectivity is now seen by some critics as anachronistic and even shameful, a bulwark to ‘critical imperatives to write postsubjectively’ (40).
But surviving trauma requires a kind of self-absorption, and recovery remains an enduring concept. If ‘trauma is the ultimate challenge to meaning making’ (Brown 228), it thrusts survivors into a heightened engagement with the possibility of clear, definitive meaning. In this way, believing that we can heal from trauma always carries a total, transcendent aspect, even if we also understand that healing is never complete. For Blanchot, ‘the search for totality … is the poetic claim par excellence, a claim in which the impossibility of being accomplished is included as its condition’ (Work of Fire 104). Moreover, Shelley notes trans studies’ complex relation with the ‘ideal of wholeness’, in that it posits a stable, fixed subject that trans identities call into question, while also offering a romanticised personhood that has been denied those same identities (200). Candrilli writes: ‘This is not my normal / narcissism. This is what I look like / when I’m trying to save myself’ (75). Candrilli’s narcissism reflects a subject’s attempt to reclaim a personhood that has been stripped from them via two distinct but intersecting means: traumatic abuse; and violent erasure due to their transness. What Runs Over evinces ‘the poetics of bondage and emancipation that can be found everywhere in the history and theory of the lyric’ (Brady 28). If Candrilli speaks of the devotion to and saving of themself, it is because the stakes are that high, and the pretence to unity that integral: Prosser quotes Gusdorf to suggest that for trans writers, the ‘“sin” of coherence may be quite explicitly a (second) salvation’ (121). What is more, for Drabinski, trans narratives like Candrilli’s ‘face the same problems as the genre generally: they must be intelligible to the self and others, relying on the very terms that they resist’ (313). They must, at least in part, operate within an outmoded system to critique it.
Transitioning, for which renaming is metonymic, becomes the emblem of agency and survival. ‘Now, in AA meetings’, Candrilli writes, ‘I call myself Kayleb and talk about the true order of things’ (85). Culler views the lyric as performative in that it strives to ‘accomplish … the act to which it refers’ (15). Only after Candrilli calls themself by their chosen name do they have access to the true order, or the mastery or totality that, for, Blanchot, poetry always seeks. One way to interpret this process is as a subject’s success, via testimonial utterance, in ‘integrat[ing] the traumatic episode into a life with a before and an after’ (Brison 54), a then and a now. To rename themself is to speak about the true order, to enact it. A ‘violent body’, once a ‘purple reaction’ (71), has expressed autonomy in the most transformative sense. The book tells the story of this renaming; it also performs it.
Conclusion
While researching and writing this essay, I have thought often of two quotes, one from Michael Rothberg, the other from Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel. In his preface to The Future of Trauma Theory, Rothberg exhorts scholars to evolve beyond the first-wave critical practices that popularised the discipline:
Once we have revealed the specificities hiding under the apparently neutral and
universal face of this understanding of trauma – its attention to events and not systems;
its assumption of privileged secure subject positions; its investment in fragmented
modern aesthetics – it is incumbent upon us to provide the counter-forms that would
maintain trauma as an object of inquiry. (xiii)
Krämer and Weigel, in their 2017 book, identify ‘a polarity in the field of testimony studies’ (xii), which divides scholars between those approaching testimony as a ‘knowledge practice’ (xi) and those interested in testimony as the ‘processing of violence’ that betrays ‘the truth of a life, an experience, a person’ (xii). Like Rothberg, Krämer and Weigel are calling for new methodologies, which might bridge a divided field.
In her 1992 book, Herman writes that ‘the traumas of one are the traumas of the other. The hysteria of women and the combat neuroses of men are one’ (32). Setting aside the crucial implications for gender, this statement reflects the fact that the diagnostic criteria for PTSD apply to people whose trauma originates in many kinds of experience. Trauma theory, as the humanities’ ‘dominant discourse for the consideration of suffering’ (Tracy 10), has tended to reflect this symptomatic truth in its core tenets. The result, as Rothberg suggests, has hardened into a formalism that homogenises trauma into an unknowable, unspeakable force that fragments narratives. But why might trauma feel ‘unspeakable’ to some survivors and not others? Why might recovery feel attainable, or out of reach? As a trauma survivor, such questions haunt me. As a poet, I am driven to understand how aspects of trauma’s context, beyond its symptoms, influence poetics.
Trauma in What Runs Over traces to certain horrific events. But Candrilli suffers within a climate of disempowerment from which we cannot separate their transness. Heterosexism and transphobia are traumatising failures of address that, in addition to Daddy’s abuse, strip Candrilli of agency. To analyse the ways that Candrilli represents traumatised thought and behaviour in isolation from this context would be another violence. I hope I have also shown that reading the book without attending to its voicing of trauma would ignore a core driver of its form and rhetoric. The ongoing use value of trauma studies as an independent field, it seems to me, rests on its recognition of ‘events’ and ‘systems’ as indivisible.
What Runs Over is not only a work of fragmentary aesthetics. It also describes an arc from trauma to recovery of a kind that trauma studies has viewed as too neat, unable to register the ‘force of traumatic recall’ (Caruth 153). Rather than diminish its power to represent trauma, however, I find that Candrilli’s careful interplay of lucid narrative, symbolism, formal disruption, surrealist imagery, empirical inconsistencies, and the assertion of a transitioned selfhood captures a greater breadth of the testimonial process. As a ‘trans genre’ between memoir and verse, the book braids empirical truth and emotional – or lyric, or poetic – truth. Trans autobiography, despite its embrace of more plural, process-oriented conceptions of trans identity, retains as one possibility an ideal of coherence historically denied trans subjects, while trans poetics imbeds into this aspiration to coherence a degree of flux, contradiction, complexity, more pronounced in poetry than in prose. What matters is not how these elements operate in isolation, but how they throw each other into relief, negate and spur each other. These tensions reflect a conflict common to trauma survivors between the desire to disclose horrible experiences and the desire to conceal them. They highlight that where there is wounding there is healing and vice versa. They also point, I think, to a middle way between the objective and subjective approaches to testimony that Krämer and Weigel identify. Poetry as Candrilli deploys it is both cognitive and embodied. Poetry names the possible and responds to the impossible – exposes and subsumes into its rhetoric the ruptures, contradictions, and misgivings that attend even the most organised narrative testimony. If this, for Blanchot, characterises poetic discourse in general, Ladin makes it central to trans poetics, which asks us to reflect on ‘the lust for and impossibility of meaning, knowing, being’ (98). Poetry as Candrilli deploys it attests to how a voice empowered to speak is also a voice empowered, in its capacity for clarity and address, to speak in a language only it knows, to keep secrets, to keep silent.