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Book Cover for: Yours, Creature, Jessica Cuello

Yours, Creature

Jessica Cuello

Yours Creature is composed of epistolary poems in the voice of Mary Shelley. Often written as missives to her famous literary mother, Wollstonecraft, the poems address months, years, and her own monstrous creation as they contend with exile, transience, and desire. These poems ask us to imagine the physical elements of Shelley's existence in language that is both luminous and visceral. This is not a book that simply recreates a past, but one that transcends time as it threads together the loss and violence that history has asked women to suppress. The poems recognize the unspoken pairing of scarcity and creation; they explore how the monstrous is born out of rejection. Yours, Creature responds to a literary and historical narrative, but the poems exist as lyric, singing of the pleasure of creation and its transformative power.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Jackleg Press
  • Publish Date: May 15th, 2023
  • Pages: 110
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.26in - 0.38lb
  • EAN: 9781737513438
  • Categories: Women AuthorsSubjects & Themes - FamilySubjects & Themes - Religious

About the Author

Cuello, Jessica: - Jessica Cuello's other books include LIAR, the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize winner; PRICKING (Tiger Bark Press 2016), winner of the 2017 CNY Book Award; and HUNT (The Word Works 2017), winner of the 2016 Washington Prize. In addition, Cuello has published three chapbooks: MY FATHER'S BARGAIN (2015), BY FIRE (2013), and CURIE (2011). Cuello was the recipient of The 2018 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize, The 2013 New Letters Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Saltonstall Writing Fellowship. In 2014 she was awarded The Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. She teaches French in Central NY and is a poetry editor for Tahoma Literary Review.

Praise for this book

Cuello's Yours, Creature showcases the versatility of the epistle as a vessel of longing, ode, and biography. In these pages, the reader is passenger on Mary Shelley's devastatingly complex and triumphant journey. This work whirs with lyricism as it poetically bridges the gap between research, imagination, and tribute.

-Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra

Not only a meeting of minds, but also a meeting of hearts, lives, and imaginations links Mary Shelley and Jessica Cuello. Urgent and original, gripping and shocking, thoroughly research-based and deeply intuitive: surely this captivating collection of illuminating epistolary strangeness is exactly what Shelley might have wished a poet of our time to write about her.

-Annie Finch, author of Spells