Jessica Cuello’s Liar, which was selected by Dorianne Laux for The Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The 2022 CNY Book Award, a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award, and a longlist mention for The Julie Suk Award. Her manuscript Yours, Creature is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in spring of 2023. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.

Shanta Lee is a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, a visual artist and public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that has been widely featured. She is the author of GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, named 2021 Vermont Book Award and winner of the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize. Shanta Lee's forthcoming collection, Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) is an illustrated poetry collection that has been longlisted for the 2021 Idaho poetry prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson prize. Her multimedia exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine is currently on view at University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art from now until Spring 2023. Among many creative endeavors, she teaches poetry at Wilkes University.

JC: In Ghettoclaustrophobia, I am struck by the girl perspective. This book feels like an act of claiming that perspective, particularly in the way that the narrator gives language to what is unnamed and unsaid.

SL: Before I dig in, speaking of the topic of the unsaid and unnamed, I feel like this is the very season (the holidays) for dancing in between such things. Do you know, Jessica, this is maybe a first or a rare time that I chose to do something outside of social construct AND tell the truth about it? (I’ve often lived slightly outside of certain constructs, but have rarely been so open about it. Just wanted to share given your opening and the holiday season is on my mind for how it invites the unsaid and unnamed).
Also, Jessica, it’s interesting you picked up on her voice. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend some months ago and she said something that caught me off guard as she said, “It feels like the little girl saying all of the things she could never say.” I finally get to live the statement we would threaten each other with as children, “I’m tellin.” Instead of this as a threat, the little girl within me who still exists is safe to do the saying, the telling without feeling like she is powerless because I am the adult who can protect her (if that makes any sense!)
Speaking to what you talk about in terms of the unnamed and unsaid, I’ve been fascinated, perhaps transfixed, by the idea of the visibility and invisibility. Growing up, my visibility was controlled. Everything from the physical manifestation (eye rolling, for example, HUGE no-no) to the verbal (for example, the answer to an adult asking me, “How are you?,” was always, “I’m fine.”). You can see how truth and naming became complicated things, right?
I was taught to lie but yet, it was something that could open a can of whoop ass if I lied or told the truth in the wrong contexts. Naming or saying the unsaid, especially within a context where children are to be seen, not heard, also was a fast track to trouble. I danced with invisibility and visibility and it increased my hunger for wanting to know what was really beneath the surface.
I could be seen, not heard, but my ears still worked, LOL. Listening to adult conversations while pretending I was not hearing what I heard. Being a silent witness and in some cases, an accomplice in the unsaid and unnamed. I trained in being a trickster in a lot of ways who has to now sort the unnamed, unsaid between these lanes of invisibility and visibility.
Jessica, what also strikes me about this is the ways that being a trickster was also about safety, especially when I think about my body within the larger landscape of history. The unnamed and unsaid within the inheritance of Brownness or Blackness could be the difference between life and death in some cases.
To expand, isn’t it often the case in many instances for many of us as either artists, writers, within marginalized groups that naming and saying or carefully navigating such a territory becomes life or death?
Speaking of language, the unnamed and unsaid, Jessica, I was struck by your use of language on a couple of different levels. Poems within your collection like, "Hungur,", "Stumic," "Liyer," "Imona," “Sind,” and "Solgire" (to name a few examples) signal, for me, the narrator’s ownership or claiming within an environment that would threaten to take that independence and power away. I would love to know more about your process in terms of the narrator’s use of language in these ways.
My other question within this realm of language is about the literal and metaphor of hunger, among many things, throughout Liar. At times, this was very felt and visceral like within the poem, “Flesh.” I have a relationship to the metaphor of hunger, I am so curious of your relationship with and to it within your collection.

JC: Ah, we have so much to talk about. I’m going to begin with the idea of remaining safe as it ties into visibility and invisibility. It resonates on the physical level—being visible meant harm, humiliation, trouble. This is a concept I still contend with on the level of language. The way that fear moves into our voice and penetrates the body until we are silenced. You mention the way that this is amplified for black and brown bodies and represents a far more dangerous risk. I attended a high school where whites were the minority and I remember observing the different treatment of black girls by teachers, coaches, and peers. There are things I remember distinctly to this day 25 years later. The touching from boys was entirely different too and this is what I saw from the outside looking in. I did not even struggle to make sense of it in the 80s because we had almost no language for the things that happened then—not even a sense of outrage—and there was a silence around all of it. I grew up in a working-class black neighborhood in Syracuse and the house across the street and the one to on our left both had residents (men) who had constant interaction with the police. I once saw a man beat by the police from my bathroom window. I knew that the police saw me differently, that I could pass right by that situation and no one would bother me. I did not know how to interpret it except as part of another giant silence. And it fit into the rest of my world—that the world was split into what was said and into what was true but not acknowledged. In “Curatorial Tags for the Exhibition,” you say, “If it isn’t named, if it isn’t spoken, / then it didn’t really happen.” I just read this exact sentiment a few days ago in an Annie Ernaux novel. It is a good explanation for the impulse to write. I think I’ve always been trying to get close to whoever was speaking truthfully because I felt that among honest people I had a chance to exist.
I have never shared this but once in high school a group of boys encircled me in the hall, shoved me around, kicked me, called me a cunt, said they wanted to fuck me. When I got away, I turned down an empty hallway, cried a little, and went to class without ever mentioning it again.
The silence that surrounds the unsaid is often replaced with a hyperobservance. For me, that attention is deeply connected to poetry. The girl in Ghettoclaustrophobia takes in the world like a person in an unknown country, always interpreting. I think the strangeness and richness of the language comes from this survival state, this double-life of saying what is expected of you and a secret self that is compressed inside, and gains a depth or density from what you are not free to say.
As for your question about the misspellings in Liar, they were taken from student papers. I collected dozens of these—colleagues would bring them to me and there was always an initial delight when I had to guess the word. I wrote dozens of poems from these words, though most were not included in the book. I felt that the concept signified by the word, when I figured it out, gave it a kind of power, like it was released from habit where it was lodged and dulled by familiarity. The misspellings came purely from sound—students knew these words from sound not image. Though for me, it’s weird, a lot of what I know came from silent reading. But even there, the image of the words did not often match sounds that I knew. I did not say the words aloud so even now I sometimes mispronounce things. And there were words that mystified me, like “sleuth” in Nancy Drew books. That transference from eye to ear—and its reverse—has a startling effect. The awakening that poems do. Your book does this often. The language wakes me up with its slight dissonance. I love the line “She washed her hair in first rain” in your poem “Mother Who Brung Ya’ (III): Some Say” and lines like “The women? // They be the kind refusin unknowin // As in they got names. As in / follow the trail of chicken feet.” It is familiar and intimate, yet breaks entirely free from expectation.
You ask about hunger. Talk about what cannot be said! I’ve only admitted recently that for the first 17 years of my life, until I went to college, I had a low-level hunger. When I was young, it was simply lack of food. There was not enough, but we never said so. Once my grandmother came by with a big bucket of fried chicken and my brother and I were thrilled, but now I see there was something shameful in this act for my mother. We also (my brother and I) refused to eat certain things. We weren’t allowed to leave the table without finishing the food given to us, but we hid food to throw it out later or flushed things down the toilet. There was both a scarcity and rigidity to food. When I was in high school two teachers pulled me aside to talk about my anorexia. But I wasn’t anorexic. I would have eaten. I didn’t know how to say that I was hungry. I did not even recognize that I was hungry. But I was often figuring how food fit into an activity or buying candy at Woolworth’s. To this day, I always want to meet friends for meals.
I have a comment about form and the way you use motif in Ghettoclaustrophobia. There are these vivid and precise objects that appear and reappear, like the scarf turned halter top. As a reader it was satisfying to see it recur pages later in very different poems. So much of the narrative occurs via the life of the objects, the homes, songs, the physical impressions imprinted on the girl’s memory.

SL: Oh man, there are so many things that I have been thinking about since reading and rereading this. The witnessing, and I will say / ask more about this but what came through in Liar, is the way that girl not only witnessed, but also carried within her body which is why a lot of your work feels so visceral. What you said about the 80’s … it almost feels like we are giving ourselves a sense of permission to not try to become our own moving company in trying to unpack the things we have no language for, or just accepting how silence becomes its own language for the dysfunction that pervades all of this.
First, there is the imagined or lived-in event. This is where language is so fluid. We don’t really recognize it. It labels and conveys. It is this quiet soundtrack of sorts. Then there is the transfer of this into new forms of language that go deeper, where language becomes more elastic, more expansive, creative, bent, etc. And then there is a final state, where language can’t say anything more, or where we are no longer there to use it, where silence comes back into the fold, and where language is asked to wait, patiently, before it can recombine at some point to be and say something else. That's what that final sequence in "Cover Songs for Edgar Rice Burroughs" speaks to: "They are guests of words now. / They are the unlit guests of words, / thresholds before the why not or what for."
You spoke about watching a man being beaten by the police from a bathroom window which triggered sharing this story. It is also tied to what you mentioned about the vivid nature and preciseness of what you noticed in Ghettoclaustrophobia), I have a memory of standing in the back stairway of our home on Harold Street and watching something happen. Me and my family were there for a few years and it was located in Hartford, CT and the only kind of nostalgia it holds is how all of the spaces within it have some kind of story that exacerbated the feelings of visibility and invisibility. It was during one of the moments of having many adults in and out of the place and my mother’s best friend at the time, we’ll call her Lena, was holding onto the banister while the father of her children / on-again-off-again boyfriend had his hands wrapped around her long black braids. They seemed to be in some kind of tug of war and he seemed to be screaming at her that she had to “Come home NOW!” She was calm and she also calmly told me to go back inside with her voice slightly raised. I just stood and stared and I knew better than to run inside and say anything about what I was seeing. How was I going to break the barrier or the edit of “Children seen, not heard,” and when did it need to be broken if people were in trouble? I was not even sure that Lena, or as I called her in those days, Auntie Lena, was in trouble. To my mind, they seemed to be maybe playing some kind of game and I can’t recall how old I was. I remember just being transfixed.
Maybe kind of similar to what you mentioned when what happened to you in the hallway and going to class without mentioning it, I went inside and stayed out of the way of the rest of the adults who were inside nursing my silence. For you, did this silence and witnessing also play a role in normalizing certain things?
I also want to circle back to hunger and something you said about not knowing how to recognize you were hungry or the rigidity and scarcity around food. For me, food has different levels to it, both literal and metaphorical.
Growing up, I recognized my mother hiding everything from her special coffee to Kraft American Cheese slices in the hallway closet underneath piles and piles of her clothing she kept there. This was at 280 Collins Street which is where we moved to after losing the Harold Street home and being homeless for some time. I recall finding it bizarre that she would have food here or sometimes pull out slices of pre-packaged lunch meat out of the arm rest. We had more than enough food, so this was something that I found to be bizarre and before I understood the nature of eating disorders, there were other rules around food in our home. We couldn’t just dip into the cereal any time of day because it was for breakfast. Til’ this day, I LOVE nothing more than having a bowl of cereal just because I can without getting into any kind of trouble. One time my parents returned home because they forgot something and I had to slide a bowl of cereal under one of the dingy sofas in the living room to hide it until they left out again. And speaking of rigidity, my brother and I were not allowed to just go help ourselves. When I see friends who allow their children to freely get food from cabinets or the refrigerator, I am in shock about the allowance of freedom. Strange to say that though because we are talking about something as basic as the human need to eat when hungry. Food!
Food or hunger is also a deeply metaphorical thing so tied to my childhood and family. It took me years to learn to love black-eyed peas again based on what I am about to tell you. I was around seven years old and my mother served me a huge bowl of black eyed peas. It was late and she told me that I had to eat the whole bowl. It was always, “Finish you food before the dessert,” never realizing until later that even this seemingly simple rule was a potential set-up for failure in terms of the relationship to food and eating though as an adult, it never manifested in that way. On this night in particular, she refused to let me get up from the table. The bowl was still pretty much full. We were in a standoff and the household became quiet because the kitchen was now cleaned and I was still sitting with my bowl of black eyed peas in this stand off with my mother to prove I did not need to eat it if I did not want to. Most of the time, I was told, “… then starve” in response to not liking something that was put in front of me and those were the choices: either eat what is served, or starve. I don’t recall how that night ended, but I had to become crafty with food I did not want to eat (like filling my mouth then going to the bathroom to flush the food down the toilet).
As an adult, I felt like I developed this relationship with hunger on a different level. I became the kind that I would rather starve than eat something metaphorically that was never going to feed me. Yet, I was so hungry for love because of being so starved out at home. I was hungry for touch which landed me in all kinds of situations seeking out to be fed in ways that I didn't realize were not nourishing at all (realizing that came later). Over time, I just owned it and often call myself a very metaphorically hungry person with an appetite that seemed to have no bottom. Satiated at times, yes and I can say over time, I have turned this towards other things like creating, learning, etc. rather than it just being about the body. Over time, I became unashamed and unafraid to admit craving or seeking such things out. And again, I became better at realizing what truly fed me regarding my interactions with men, love, and the things that truly engaged me in the world.
I guess you could say that my vocabulary for thinking about ways to be both fed and nourished expanded over time. And the sexual element was something I definitely witnessed while growing up because my mother seemed to be a hungry woman. That food she hid in her clothing space feels like it was connected to the way that she had a whole ass man, my father, who worked and provided for us and she still had the hot nerve to hunger for more in terms of male attention and other things that transgressed beyond those boundaries.
Over time, has that element of hunger become something else for you that you have noticed? And in returning to the role of witness in your work, I am curious about what you had to do to enter the state of returning as the adult witness and be inhabited by the girl in Liar, or was she always there awaiting her turn to speak? Are there poems that you feel you could not write because of what they surfaced? For example, with my memoir, there is a chapter that I kept trying to revise and each time I tried, I’d fall asleep. I decided that I did not need, at least for now, to include that chapter given the impact it was having for me.
There are many lines and pieces that I will ask you about because, again, there are so many layers to this collection. And at the heart of what I am asking, I am curious about the feeling, thoughts, and process for you returning to haunt your life and memories in such a way because the girl in Liar doesn’t just bring us in. We are right there with her. Also, as a witness and bearing the silence, what have you noticed is the price you have had to pay for such a role, or do you see it in that way? For years, I’ve felt like the witness in any family is often punished in different ways …

JC: YES about the silence! Silence normalized everything—to such a degree that to this day I doubt my own memories and feelings. Again your line of poetry: “If it isn’t named, if it isn’t spoken, / then it didn’t really happen.”
Our home had the same unspoken rule about feeding ourselves from the kitchen. For years, there was nothing to snack on, but when I was little, I did not even like to enter the kitchen to get a glass of water. I used to drink out of the bathroom sink. I didn’t use a glass, I’d put my head down to the faucet like a cat, lol. Even though I lived in our home(s) I never felt like the space outside my bedroom was mine to enter. I felt unwanted, especially in the kitchen.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the price paid for being a witness. I suspect it might help me. I don’t feel like a witness. I feel invisible. For the most part, I keep my writing life separate from family; they don’t know Liar exists. I do know that writing soothes the ache that comes from silence. Not publishing, not even being read, but the act itself.
What you say about different kinds of hunger resonates deeply. I know it is tied to voice. I had a student who was a self-selective mute a few years ago and I read a book about the condition in order to be a better teacher to her. When I read it, I recognized myself from elementary school. Self-selective mutes will not eat in front of others. My second grade teacher, who hated me, used to send me on ahead to eat alone. Instead I secretly threw my lunch out every day.
Like you, I could not leave the dinner table without finishing food. I still don’t fully understand my refusal to eat. I guess revulsion to forcing something in your mouth, a desire for autonomy? I’m working on a 5th manuscript that digs into mutism and hunger in a more personal way. Liar is persona in a way, or at least, feigned persona. I mix in non-personal details in order to keep it at arm’s length. In answer to your question about entering that space, I find that I am unable to ignore that place, no matter how I turn my writing away from it. I am trying to learn how to surrender, yet I’m still afraid.
Shanta, I feel like you and I could talk for a long time. Thank you for sharing with me here. I didn’t want it to end. I am very excited to see what you write next.

SL: Hmmmm, what you say here is so rich (everything really) and surrender, can we make that something we explore another time? I swear, that is a practice for me too that is ongoing. You wrote about writing soothing the ache from silence. For me, writing was the balm for playing in the margins of seen and unseen though it was an environment that inspired so much hypervigilance. What struck me too is you sharing, “I don’t feel like a witness. I feel invisible.” You know, within the invisibility for me, I turned it into a place where I could just soak up everything I was seeing. I started filling journals (and course hiding them) with everything I saw and experienced while also posing questions intermittently. You asked about the price that I feel like I pay for witness, it feels like it is a combination of a price that is internal that plays out in different ways inside of me like my body is taking a hit. Isolation because when you (1) dare to be the witness and (2) be the witness who will tell or write about what she sees, then the people who don’t want to be seen and / or hear anything of the truth lose any appearance of power they seemed to have when no one questioned them or saw them doing whatever they were doing. The witness forces accountability sometimes in situations where no one wants to hold that accountability .
I feel like you and I could say so much more, Jessica. I equally could talk to you for more than the pages allow, but I have a feeling that our conversation will continue in other iterations. I am looking forward to your next work. I am somewhere between several manuscripts, one focused on my dreams and another that seems to have entered the area of erotic poetry. Those are unzipping and of course, there’s Black Metamorphoses coming in 2023! I still feel like Ovid and I are still on the phone talking to each other across time.

December, 2022