Liar, Jessica Cuello

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A highly original vision, voice, concept, style, language and image all working together to produce a world inside our world. Filled with fire and violence, mystery and magic, the loneliness of laundromats, rented houses, suicide, cornfields, hunger, and ultimately a naked raw survival, “charred walls pulled back from the frame.”
—Dorianne Laux

The genius of Jessica Cuello’s Liar is signaled by the (mis)spellings. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation were not standardized until the eighteenth century, the era of printers and profit. These poems remind us that children, before they are indoctrinated into a world of correctness and pecuniary value, absorb the raw emotions swirling around them. Children hear truth even as they are told to spell it differently. The trauma of that disparity is conveyed in these poems. Liar carries the reader into the world of a chiald for whom “love is the sideswipe in the hall.”
—Natasha Sajé

In her gutting Liar, Jessica Cuello, a master of the persona poem, flings off the mask to bare and bear remembered and imagined pasts. Writing often from the point of view of a child, Cuello’s intricate and spellbinding poems take us on a journey of hunger and house burnings, lost fathers and distant mothers, laundromats and lust—girls longing to wear something other than shame, to claim and hold themselves in welcoming arms. “Uncross,” she writes, “Let your chest see.” Through poem after poem, she uncrosses, she welcomes them.
—Philip Metres

I Nod When the School’s Visiting Doctor Asks
If I Eat Three Meals a Day

In my family
you recreate invisible

and freeze like a rabbit.
You do not cry—

God can read your mind.
In my family, you lie

in the snow and dream
how your birth happened:

the rough edge of the tabletop,
the knuckles of the artist father

who paints all night in a disease.
Then leaves and leaves. No one

confesses anything.
The black and blue mother

scrapes herself together
and into the world comes

a baby with her mouth open.
In my family you tame your needs.

You bite—but don’t chew—
the winter leaves.

You drink milk-white snow
from your mittens.

 

After

No one wanted to clean the blood
in the shower, so no one did.

Four days went by. My uncle would

not go in; my father was missing;
police don’t do cleanup. At last,

my uncle’s fiancé went in with a bucket.

She was new to our country. The death
was not hers. She was nineteen

and went down on her knees. She wore

rubber gloves. A year later she married
my uncle. Her beautiful face glowed

by a candle; her dress was a shiny, deep

peach, not white. No one was closer
to my age when my mother shot herself.

Back then, I used to clutch my shoulder

with the opposite hand. One day she
stopped me, and gently lifted my arm.

Uncross, she said, Let your chest see.

Description

Jessica Cuello is the author of Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. She is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is a poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review.

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