In Liar, Jessica Cuello achieves in a whole collection what I’ve managed to do successfully only in a few poems: inhabit the body of a child — the former self — and exercise her voice and agency while still suggesting a child-like innocence. It’s a delicate balancing act. After all, the poet wields an adult’s vocabulary and diction, an adult’s eye for the symbolic, the necessary detail, the ability to spot an irony — and yet Cuello elides the poet with the girl, and the girl has a story to tell.
With regards to language itself, and how it belongs to us, Cuello employs a neat trick, but sparingly. In several of the poems, words are misspelled as a child might do: stumic, hungur, chiald, liyer, and others that appear through the collection. This trope does a few things for me: it implies the ignorance of childhood — that simple not-knowing from knowing — and it suggests that the girl does not know the correct spellings because no one has bothered to teach her. The adults that inhabit this book are so absorbed in their own cognitive egocentrism that they don’t even see the girl in their midst as she slips little by little through the cracks.
Take the poem “Stumic.” The speaker is witness to the abuse and death of a dog who returns as a ghost, and what emerges is the sense that the dog’s presence in any form is preferable to that of the humans whose actions directly affect the safety of the innocent:
Stumic
Dried dirt on the choke chain, welts
on her stumic, little knots of blood.
Put her down — the dog done,
ears askance in a question to the sky.
Her red-rimmed eyes asked: Will I come back?
She came as a motion in the bedroom —
ghost of cold air passing. I reached to pet her,
my arm twisted. Are you there?
She did not stop. Paws clicked past
the mattress, her chest a holy hill.
Her stumic had no sores, was smooth
as hardened sand beneath her. Cold passed.
I was not a bystander when her stumic
took the hurt. I was both boy and animal,
huddle and bat. I learned violent’s flinch
from her. At night we listened together.
Her stumic was a pillow for my head;
it rose and fell like a cage of breath.
One can’t help but see how the speaker might find companionship with the abused and understand herself as more closely aligned with the maligned that the maligner. This poem is largely representative of the poetic style found in Liar: sense of place and time, scene and intention, built up through the accretion of startling images: the welts, red-rimmed eyes, twisted arm. An almost nauseous uneasiness seeps through this poem.
The narratives — told in hazy scenes that feel ghostly in the way memories from childhood can — tell of being left alone and untouched. What happens when you leave a girl to fend for herself? She sets things on fire: “It spread, from my hand / to the toilet paper, to the / fringed edges of the curtain.” She turns to the attention of boys as a kind of love: “Love is the sideswipe / in the hall, a hundred / bodies touching.” She becomes pregnant as a girl and loses the baby: “Before I knit you in the womb / I knew you / and after I was never known // and when the world left me/ I wept like Joseph, / father of no baby …” One knows that the speaker is not to blame, that even her own actions were enacted upon her, and one comes to understand that these outcomes were the passive effects of neglect.
With regards to this neglect, and the abandonment of a child, whether physical or emotional, the indicted are numerous: the cold and distant mother, the father who comes and goes, the brother whose humanity is undone by anger, but especially the community that has failed them all. The mixing together of these poems speaks of dysfunction as it relates to place. I say this because the collection includes poems about institutionalized babysitters (“My Babysitter Karen B Who Was Sent to Willard Asylum”), murdered nurses (“Irene, Goodnight”), and high school illiterates (“High School Illiterate”) — all products of a community that failed them.
I recognize the place immediately. Or rather, the place is any place where dysfunction is passed on from generation to generation, and it is underpinned by poverty and the misguided belief that religion will lift believers out of the mire of place and its attendant miseries. Indeed, the poems make clear that Christianity, within the context of the collection’s setting, is used to shame and control. In Liar, shame is wielded like an omnipresent weapon, as spelled out in “Hungur”: “Shame was the time of day… Shame to eat. Shame to Pee. Shame to enter in and exit out.”
I come from the same town. Went to the same school. Was judged by the same citizens who could not fathom the effects of neglect on a child left to find her way without nurturing. Knew the same sort of people who could not outlast life’s hard knocks. Thus, even though this telling feels intimate and particular to the speaker, many readers will feel that reading Cuello’s collection is like returning to a town we are grateful to have escaped from.
Liar is a book of many small tragedies — all the lives that never reached their full potential, whether from self-harm or harm inflicted by individuals who seemed to have no other way of interacting. The very existence of the book itself, despite its content, is a triumph. A triumph of literature, sure; it’s such a fine and unified book of poetry — clever in its use of language, evocative of atmosphere, arcing in its progression from innocence to experience. More importantly, though, if I dare to say anything could be more important than the triumph of literature, is that the very existence of the book indicates that the girl inhabiting the poems broke the cycle of dysfunction. She escaped with her life to tell of it, and we are the benefactors of that survival.
[Published by Barrow Street Press on October 10, 2021, 79 pages, $18.00 paperback]