Yours, Creature - by Jessica Cuello (Paperback)

About the Book

The poems navigate themes of creation, violence, grief, transformation, and lineage. These are heart-wrenching missives that unfurl with exquisite monstrosities.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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