Liar by Jessica Cuello
Barrow Street Books, 2021
Liar is a moving and accomplished book by Jessica Cuello. It employs a voice that is strange and original. There is something important at stake, an abandoned child, “a child of liyers” trying to cope with shattering events. The poems are predominantly dramatic monologues narrated by the unseen child. The odd misspelled titles feel mysterious and even jarring until the reader realizes they are the way a child hears things before learning how to read: “Hungur” for hunger, “Liying “for lying, “Imona” for pneumonia. Loneliness, fear, and shame are the emotions presented by a child trying to understand the confusing parts of her world. She knows but does not understand why her father has disappeared, why her mother is angry, why a social worker asks her if she eats three meals a day. A liar is one who does not tell the truth, and the children in these poems, kept from the truth, try to make sense of what they hear from the mouths of adults. There are moments of honesty and kindness, too, from an adopted grandmother, a school librarian, and a gentle babysitter hired from the local asylum… “Karen B.”
But mostly lies and secrets abound. The complicated grief that imbues this book details a father who left, a mother who is unable to cope, and a series of misfortunes that paralyze the family. It is a landscape of pain and neglect. Home and housing are central metaphors, along with small confined space: showers, narrow hallways, rooms with no doors, lockdown spaces. Often there is a child who hears words but cannot relate them to her condition, struggling to make sense of the confusing world. Cuello uses images like a dog on a choke chain, a girl who feels affection as a brush in the hallway, and a man holding out his burning arm as images of pain and confinement, wrenching in their emotional impact.
Cuello is a master of the monologue. We hear the voices of the slut-shamed child, the illiterate child, the one who thinks she has sinned, the one who does not admit she is hungry, the child who’s started a fire but refuses to “confess anything.” The places of refuge are the nurse’s room, the library. In “Child at the Library,” the speaker chants, “Sacred is the library / Sacred are words / gathered into spines.” The book is dedicated to “school teachers & librarians,” emphasizing that there are some authority figures who help children make sense of the confusing and often painful world.
The poems of Liar are empathetic but not moralistic or heavy-handed. They witness and record but do not yearn towards transcendence. Home and housing are central metaphors but neither offer safety or comfort. Affection is a slap in the hallway, a cousin’s special photo on the refrigerator that reminds her of her own ordinariness. Even school presents problems for a child who can’t read or spell but whose relentless attention is riveting as adults question her about her diet. Hunger follows her to school along with fear and disorientation.
The final poem of the book is “No One is Listening; Psalm 77,” a poem of grief in which the speaker views herself as “an alien”:
My heart isn’t hard but floats outside
where my mother taps her tentative
hand against the door. I am hers,
an alien. No One tread upon the sea,marching through deep waters.
No One’s footprints are all
unseen. No One made me.
The poems in Liar bear witness to heartbreaking aloneness. They record a terrifying world, but they do not descend into moralizing. They honor the state of unknowing, enact the mystery of experience. The poems record not only a physical poverty, but an emotional poverty. “I love her face,” says the child in “Flesh,” “before she trains me not to.” Another memorable poem, “That Shirt Makes You Look Like A Whore Because It’s Black,” a poem about shame, shows the agony of being an unappreciated female child—not only unappreciated, but also suffering the malignant criticism of her appearance and her attempt at looking pretty.
Monologues of the narrator are intertwined with monologues in the voices of other children who also suffer cruelties, which has the cumulative effect of enlarging the scope and power of the book. This weaving together of the remembered and the imagined into a confluence of children’s haunting voices creates a power. Into the overwhelming sadness Cuello forges a harrowing beauty from their endurance. Essentially these children, overwhelmed and trying to make sense of the dark mysteries of the adult world, are survivors.
Cuello is a daughter of Dickinson, her poems concise, compressed, and psychologically intense. They resist morals and easy endings. Astute in mystery and complexity they sometimes read like riddles, puzzles, or cautionary tales, which do not always easily give up a meaning or a moral. This is their unique power. They don’t click shut like a box but radiate with uncertainty and pain. This book makes me want to read more of her work, to study how she arrived at this unique balance of clarity, mystery, and meaning. Liar opens us into another world, a difficult world, but one well worth seeing through the eyes of a gifted and empathetic poet.
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Geraldine Connolly has published four poetry collections, including Province of Fire and Aileron. She has taught at the Writers Center in Maryland, the Chautauqua Institution, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Cafritz Foundation. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.