In Retrospect: An Interview with Chris Watkins, Author of The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Chrysanthemum (Chris) Watkins, whose poem “Prayer (II)” we published in 2024. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped Watkins’ body of work, from her early writing to her most recent compositions. Their 2026 collection, The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus, contemporizes and enlivens Biblical mysteries, exploring queer and trans identities and Florida ecologies. Here, Watkins walks us through their life in poetry thus far, from an early poem about carnivorous trees to poems about the holiness of nature and queerness.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Chris Watkins: The earliest poem I can remember writing—it’s definitely not the earliest poem I wrote—but the earliest I can remember and the first poem I ever published was this poem called “Carnivorous” about how trees eat people, and that’s why they turn red in the fall—all the blood. I published it in this little indie magazine called Motley that some friends in Chicago used to run out of their apartment. That magazine was my first real writing community. I did my first readings with them—think people clutching cans of PBR and sitting on the floor of an old Midwestern apartment listening to kind of okay poems. It was great!
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your debut collection of poetry spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
CW: There are two poems that come to mind. I’m not sure which came first. There’s “The Apostle Paula” and the title poem of my collection, “The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus.” They were first drafted within a few weeks of each other. Those two definitely unlocked a way for me to talk about queerness and religious trauma without just saying, “That part of my childhood really sucked.” I really hate the Apostle Paul who, in the book of Acts, has this major epiphanic conversion moment that Lutherans love and who then writes a bunch of letters to all these churches telling women they suck and that they should dress conservatively. So, I thought it would be funny for Paul to have this new epiphany when Jesus put him in drag. And the “Drag Gospel” was actually inspired by a real drag performer, Gay Jesus, whose work I really love. I mixed some of what they do with Christ’s Beatitudes, and out came the title poem.
FP: In terms of the evolution of your collection, could you briefly map out the stages your manuscript went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
CW: Early on, I was going to do a chapbook of just drag poems, but I quickly realized that I probably had too many poems for that, and I really wanted to include some of the eco poems I had been writing alongside these religious drag poems. I didn’t feel like the two immediately made sense together, though—nature and drag. This is actually reflective of how I feel a lot of the time as a transfemme who really loves being hip deep in black swamp water. Like, is anybody going to get both this poem about death drops and estrogen and this poem about swamp chickens and alligators? So, I intentionally wrote toward both sides of the coin, and I read a lot about queer ecology, and in the end decided that not only did the two sides make sense in one book, but it was vitally important that they be together. I wanted to say that both things were holy—queerness and the natural world.
And as far as actually sectioning the book goes, I’m kind of obsessed with threes. My MFA manuscript that never panned out had three sections. The Trinity (a concept I play with throughout the book) is three parts—”God in three persons” which I think is hella queer. And I just like the beginning, middle, end nature of having three sections. So, I think I always knew it would lay out in three parts. But I spent a lot of time physically setting the poems on the floor and arranging them and then rearranging them and then rearranging the rearrangements before I got to the sections and the order as they exist today.
FP: What lesson(s) did writing and publishing your first collection of poetry teach you that you hope to apply to future collections?
CW: As far as writing is concerned, I suppose the main thing I learned was how to make a collection be more than just a bunch of poems. After I had a bunch of poems in the works, I started to intentionally write new ones that would play off more than one of the older poems to tie the whole collection together. More and more, poets are interested in the collection as a unit, not just a gathering of all the poems you’ve written lately.
And as far as publishing is concerned, I learned to just submit everywhere always. I was runner up for two book prizes and a finalist at a few others, not to mention the countless rejections, before I placed The Drag Gospel with Saturnalia Books.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
CW: Definitely an obsession with the natural world. Especially rivers. I’ve always loved the water and boats! Transness and queerness at large run throughout my work pretty obviously. And I try to extend transness out beyond my own body. I try to see the world as trans. A saltmarsh, for instance, is really a nonbinary place—not quite land or water, and the water not quite salt or fresh.
FP: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing often starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
CW: I’m in the process of writing a book that centers on my home river, the Apalachicola. I’m on the board of directors of Apalachicola Riverkeeper, an environmental nonprofit that protects the river, so I think about that water a lot. I’m writing a lot about Florida more broadly, too, and about mental health. If The Drag Gospel centers on queerness and nature and is tied together by religion/holiness, this new manuscript centers on nature and queerness and is tied together by mental health. I’m constantly thinking about the climate crises and the other crises of the Anthropocene. Like too much. And it’s tough sometimes being a trans person in Florida (or really, throughout the US, and just in the world). Sometimes it feels like you are climbing a mountain of legislation. At the same time, I love this state so much—the rivers, the landscape, the people. I’m originally from the Midwest, but Florida is my home, my chosen home. And I’m not leaving. I hope readers will find in my new work both deep love and deep defiance.
