Dear Readers,
For those of you who decide to spend time with Jessica Cuello’s Yours, Creature, you will not be disappointed. The collection is a remarkable demonstration of the power of the epistolary form as well as an equally remarkable tribute to the life and work of Mary Shelley.
The collection’s 97 pages present 48 poems in six sections, each in letter form, and span a lifetime. While many pieces share salutations (“Dear Mother” and “Dear Creature” regular openings), each poem is utterly unique and uniquely Cuello.
The collection masterfully demonstrates the timeless poetic power of letter writing as both a tool for documentation and for a deeper understanding of the complex and layered worlds in which the letter writer experienced life.
Yours, Creature – It’s surprising. It’s educational. It’s haunting.
Together, the pieces present Mary Shelley’s deeply layered complexity.
From “Dear Mother, [I wanted to crawl]”:
A line from the red radius of your womb
went dark. That night the whole of London
raised its eyes to watch the comet pass –
except for us.’
(a letter from Mary Shelley speaking to the night of her birth)
to “Dear Mother, [You wrote that]”
A person has a right to tell
And I could tell a tale by bight.
I wrote beside the tossed grey water
and where the dark red rags were soaked
I told by yeast and flour,
made a man, made a monster,
put it on the Chamonix
The work not only describes a life, it pulses with life.
It’s poignant. It’s impassioned. It’s charged.
It also charges readers to desire more - more storytelling, more poetry, and more expertly researched history.
Cuello’s attention to detail is unmatched. Relying on primary historical sources (including Charlotte Gordon’s dual biography, Romantic Outlaws, and letters written by Mary Shelley, as detailed in the collection’s Notes), the poems paint a life as complex as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Tonally, the work is as haunting as it is educational. With each reading comes a deeper appreciation for Cuello’s exquisite writing and a deeper understanding of a life full of hardship, heartbreak, and horror. Mary Shelley would, undoubtedly, approve.
Not only is the work tonally reminiscent of Shelley’s Frankenstein, it also fully embraces the gothic genre in poetic form, with villains and heroines, darkness and death, horror and harrowing losses. Written in the voice and persona of Mary Shelley, the work speaks to the mother Shelley lost ten days after childbirth (due to an infection that developed during Shelley’s birth).
From birth – In “Dear Mother, [Father noted each event]”:
Your afterbirth would not come out
the doctor pulled it away in pieces –
,,,
and to expel the placenta
puppies suckled the milk
your body meant for me —
To girlhood – In “Dear Scottish time”:
Father sent me away – or was it stepmother/?
To be sent is different from being left.
To be left is to remain in the walls
that repel you. Memory rooms
have no equilibrium. They never match
and Mine so full of him. His turn, his back.
To love affairs – “Dear Mother, [I did not write]”:
The backward-looking need no enemies
and every world is provincial once you’re in it.
Your pregnant daughter,
Mary Shelley
To births – In “Dear Rejection 1815”:
In threes they came: the mother, the father,
the holy lover. One by one they cut me loose:
the first went underground without me.
amidst cycles of life, the work explores ongoing loss all while Shelley’s work on Frankenstein was born. For example, in ‘Dear Mother, [His wife was Harriet]’:
There is nothing in my arms
another nothing
added to the nothing first
the nothing second
How do you think of punishment?
Girls make their own
Did you guess your name
would get me love
and blame?
Themes revolve around love, loss, pregnancy, childbirth, and again, loss. It’s a harrowing collection that is as gripping as it is educational and as moving as it is memorable. The collection masterfully blends history and gorgeous text in a way that is both accessible and memorable. Its fabulous in ways that extend far beyond form, genre, and any single poem.
Through its haunting exploration of desire, loss, exile, and rejection, and the monstrous creations that can follow, the work simultaneously celebrates the marvelous power of the desire to create and the creative process.
Dear Readers, I hope you enjoy the collection as much as I did.
Yours in poetry, a Fan and Reader (of both Mary Shelley and Jessica Cuello)
Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.