Yours, Creature

“I was a tent-stitch / on the pocket of his mind, a grafted // cut in his bark of book,” writes Mary Shelley to her dead mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in Jessica Cuello’s Yours, Creature. The “he” is Shelley’s father. The fictional letter, signed “Yours, as ever, & unmothered, / Mary,” is one of 48 forming this epistolary poetic biography, which extends from Mary Shelley’s loss of her mother, shortly after her birth, to the drowning of her husband, Percy Shelley.

The bulk of the letters are addressed to Wollstonecraft, aching with her absence and at times acknowledging her literary legacy. One letter is signed, “I who copy you, Mary.” Even a dead mother’s grip must be broken from; Cuello depicts Mary Shelley transferring her fixation from her maker to her own successful creation:

You wrote that you could not avoid the “I”

A person has a right to tell
and I could tell a tale by night

I wrote beside the tossed grey water
And where the dark red rags were soaked

I told by yeast and flour,
made a man, made a monster,
put it on the Chamonix

Mary Shelley has, of course, begun writing Frankenstein; letters are now addressed “Dear Creature,” and signed “Your monstrous maker” and “your loving creator.” Within these poems, confluences of monstrosity and the female body surface:

when we read “Christabel”
P. thought my nipples

were eyes. He ran away—
afraid. I suppose each hole

of my body is an eye.
Especially my mouth—

Cuello opens another Dear Creature poem with a quote from a love letter from Percy—“You alone reconcile me to myself”—and quickly turns to Mary’s revelation of how she has fed the needs of her husband’s ego and his stomach. For alongside trauma, including Mary’s loss of three children, Cuello emphasizes a gendered anxiety of influence that builds beyond the demands of Mary’s father and husband. In a flashback to a formative childhood memory, Mary recalls Coleridge reciting “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

Serpent monsters swarmed the floor
and there has always been a man

like a tower light—
and me the swarm