Hunt by Jessica Cuello. The Word Works, 2017. 81 pages. $17.
II.
Cuello’s second collection, Hunt (The Word Works, 2017), is the winner of the 2016 Washington Prize. In a conversation with fellow author Jenna Le at Passages North, Cuello had this to say about the project of Hunt:
I can see that there is an eco-poetics to Hunt, but I didn’t approach the poems from that direction. If I write from an idea or an ethics, my poems tend to be doomed. I do think that environmental concerns are directly related to our violence to people; on my mind now is Flint, Michigan and the [Dakota Access Pipeline]…The poems in Hunt were borne out of a passion for Moby Dick and my own obsessions (which emerge from a kind of mixture of repression and pressure), but they ended up being eerily timely. At a reading in November, a week after the [2016 Presidential] election, I read a few of the Ahab poems. When I read the first lines, “The word brother is not his word. / It’s Me and Them” from “The Chase ~ First Day” the room grew deeply quiet. We all knew. I had a lump in my throat reading the last lines.
Hunt, then, in a continuation of themes from Pricking, also demonstrates Cuello’s interest in naming and testifying to historical, social violence. There is a density of beauty in Cuello’s lines—in her shifting registers of language and agility with double entendre, metaphor—but reading and rereading her poems shows how deepest and clearest is her attention to emotion and violence as a rope around us all. This attention—and the acknowledgement that violence does not happen in a vacuum, but between humans and other animals, humans and the environment—gives Cuello’s poems a philosophical facility and a litheness of form. These poems are what a capacious, feeling mind makes of the world.
The first poem in Hunt, “Loomings: The Wife at Home,” shows a sharedness of bodies and environment between the human speaker and the implied whale, as the language of sea and “beast” roil into the language of conception and pregnancy:
The body makes a sea:
a sea for mine, for the stay behind
When the men go
and ropes clatter at the dock
we hear them off, off
and inside my tumbling sea
a beast rolls over
on the clay bottom
I sense her lovesick eye
in the corner
cordoned on all sides
her beasty eye
where the rage pools
in the umbilical silt and moon
I subdue her trance
and claw, her dreamy eye
shrill with disappointment
and left to survive
What language does a poet reach for to describe an extreme of both intimacy and distance—the fetus hidden inside the body? “[T]he Lord won’t crush what moves / on its own…secretly,” wrote the poet Fanny Howe in her poem “The Nursery.” In Cuello’s poem, the fetus rolls like a whale in the deep—unlike a whale’s movements, this is an event the mother’s body feels dramatically. And yet it is hidden, and birth “looms” in the future. Under the title of “Loomings,” the creatures of the ocean and the human body shadow the page, the poem, and the arcing narrative of Hunt. The animal linking of bodies between “wife at home” and whale occurs at both the metaphoric and the physical levels. In later poems, the analogy that woman and whale are both subjects of different hunts is developed (as in the poems “The Whale Reflects on Being a Hunted Object,” “The Whale Looks at Painted Depictions of Herself,” and “The Whale as Object of Desire”). But at the level of the body and the environment, woman and whale are both mammals, and the amniotic fluid that the fetus floats in is the same saline content as the sea: “the body makes a sea.”
The gate that Hunt’s first poem swings open is one of negativity—in the theological, philosophical and creative sense of not-knowing. It ushers its reader into the strangeness of the environ: Herman Melville’s infamously detailed novel, Moby Dick. It offers the weight of history, the weight of a source text, the weight of characters and other people. It hints at the metamorphosis-like merging of whale body and human body that will take place across its poems, the inversion of Melville’s narrative (the whale has a voice and perspective, now). When I ask myself what Cuello’s Hunt risks, the answer I find is strangeness, the discomfort of violence—that is, what good art risks all the time: drawing the reader’s attention towards the terrible beauty of our world and our deeds. As in Pricking, the violence is real in poems like “The Counterpane” (“Trying to contain the sudden flinch / and little bruise, I beat. / I beat to bring on silences”) and “Ahab’s Wife Thinks of Her Honeymoon,” where the wife speaker recalls:
That girl repeats five times
whatever she will say.
She looks the other way
out of her life
when he throws her to the floor,
limp rag, a body with its holes.
A brute can be a good guy,
can provide.
Every human history is a history of violence, but Cuello’s Hunt puts narratively linked violences on a revolving stage together. How should you respond as a reader when you encounter artistic renderings of violence and suffering? The best response is to never stop asking yourself this question. Iris Murdoch, in her essay “Against Dryness” (in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature) argues that “art too lives in a region where all human endeavour is failure…Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling, and defeats our attempts, in W. H. Auden’s words, to use it as magic.” The magic of Hunt is in its feeling-attention to multiple perspectives, to the imaginative space it gives to the thoughts, dreams, testimonies and accounts of women, children, the whale, the other sailors, the tools of the hunt and sailing, the forge. Under each poem’s title, an accompanying reference to a chapter in Moby Dick, a textual touchstone. And nowhere—nowhere—a consolation prize for reading.
By not consoling its reader, Hunt is able to pursue other readerly goods—such as a wonder that is yoked to truth, to the strangeness of human and animal lives. In this wonder lives a critique of relations and power dynamics. Masculinity, labor, the brutal conditions produced by market, whiteness, gender—these concepts and forces are engaged at the level of the poem’s line. In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the whale describes:
You stood on the abyss.
My body dove. It was speckled,
brown, earth-bound. The whiteness
was your own mind looking on.
What this poem is able to do, how it is able to talk about perspective and point of view, is encompassed by the narrative of whale and hunter, of desire and prize. “The paint was a lie,” the whale explains, “but the act of painting was real.” This is one of the best poems I have read addressing the ability of whiteness to negate a vision of others, to shape the world after its own image and act of “perception.”
Ahab white-washes the whale with his mind. It is a sonnet-like ability to do such rich, conceptual work in the space of a single page.
In the poem “Squid,” the whale describes its food,
My food rose in white ghost glory,
sent silence over the water,
came from an under
where forests begin and mountains.
The whale describes its food, its hunger: “the pleasure is / that bite. The skin, the juice that runs, / Disgorge an arm, pulpy mass, cream,” and how it eats “But to survive. / To be alive.” This is a marked difference between whale and human hunter. In the poem’s final line, the whale notes: “You are different: kill and sell,” a condemnation of humankind’s drive for profit and usury, for the hunt of the natural world that results in excess and spoilage.
Hunt and Pricking testify to a poet who moves fluidly through human and literary history with deep range, feeling, and formal dexterity. Each of Cuello’s collections reads as a lyric catalog, gathering an abundance of wreck and loveliness that transgresses the nets of their lines and stanzas.
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Hunt by Jessica Cuello. The Word Works, 2017. 81 pages. $17.
II.
Cuello’s second collection, Hunt (The Word Works, 2017), is the winner of the 2016 Washington Prize. In a conversation with fellow author Jenna Le at Passages North, Cuello had this to say about the project of Hunt:
I can see that there is an eco-poetics to Hunt, but I didn’t approach the poems from that direction. If I write from an idea or an ethics, my poems tend to be doomed. I do think that environmental concerns are directly related to our violence to people; on my mind now is Flint, Michigan and the [Dakota Access Pipeline]…The poems in Hunt were borne out of a passion for Moby Dick and my own obsessions (which emerge from a kind of mixture of repression and pressure), but they ended up being eerily timely. At a reading in November, a week after the [2016 Presidential] election, I read a few of the Ahab poems. When I read the first lines, “The word brother is not his word. / It’s Me and Them” from “The Chase ~ First Day” the room grew deeply quiet. We all knew. I had a lump in my throat reading the last lines.
Hunt, then, in a continuation of themes from Pricking, also demonstrates Cuello’s interest in naming and testifying to historical, social violence. There is a density of beauty in Cuello’s lines—in her shifting registers of language and agility with double entendre, metaphor—but reading and rereading her poems shows how deepest and clearest is her attention to emotion and violence as a rope around us all. This attention—and the acknowledgement that violence does not happen in a vacuum, but between humans and other animals, humans and the environment—gives Cuello’s poems a philosophical facility and a litheness of form. These poems are what a capacious, feeling mind makes of the world.
The first poem in Hunt, “Loomings: The Wife at Home,” shows a sharedness of bodies and environment between the human speaker and the implied whale, as the language of sea and “beast” roil into the language of conception and pregnancy:
The body makes a sea:
a sea for mine, for the stay behind
When the men go
and ropes clatter at the dock
we hear them off, off
and inside my tumbling sea
a beast rolls over
on the clay bottom
I sense her lovesick eye
in the corner
cordoned on all sides
her beasty eye
where the rage pools
in the umbilical silt and moon
I subdue her trance
and claw, her dreamy eye
shrill with disappointment
and left to survive
What language does a poet reach for to describe an extreme of both intimacy and distance—the fetus hidden inside the body? “[T]he Lord won’t crush what moves / on its own…secretly,” wrote the poet Fanny Howe in her poem “The Nursery.” In Cuello’s poem, the fetus rolls like a whale in the deep—unlike a whale’s movements, this is an event the mother’s body feels dramatically. And yet it is hidden, and birth “looms” in the future. Under the title of “Loomings,” the creatures of the ocean and the human body shadow the page, the poem, and the arcing narrative of Hunt. The animal linking of bodies between “wife at home” and whale occurs at both the metaphoric and the physical levels. In later poems, the analogy that woman and whale are both subjects of different hunts is developed (as in the poems “The Whale Reflects on Being a Hunted Object,” “The Whale Looks at Painted Depictions of Herself,” and “The Whale as Object of Desire”). But at the level of the body and the environment, woman and whale are both mammals, and the amniotic fluid that the fetus floats in is the same saline content as the sea: “the body makes a sea.”
The gate that Hunt’s first poem swings open is one of negativity—in the theological, philosophical and creative sense of not-knowing. It ushers its reader into the strangeness of the environ: Herman Melville’s infamously detailed novel, Moby Dick. It offers the weight of history, the weight of a source text, the weight of characters and other people. It hints at the metamorphosis-like merging of whale body and human body that will take place across its poems, the inversion of Melville’s narrative (the whale has a voice and perspective, now). When I ask myself what Cuello’s Hunt risks, the answer I find is strangeness, the discomfort of violence—that is, what good art risks all the time: drawing the reader’s attention towards the terrible beauty of our world and our deeds. As in Pricking, the violence is real in poems like “The Counterpane” (“Trying to contain the sudden flinch / and little bruise, I beat. / I beat to bring on silences”) and “Ahab’s Wife Thinks of Her Honeymoon,” where the wife speaker recalls:
That girl repeats five times
whatever she will say.
She looks the other way
out of her life
when he throws her to the floor,
limp rag, a body with its holes.
A brute can be a good guy,
can provide.
Every human history is a history of violence, but Cuello’s Hunt puts narratively linked violences on a revolving stage together. How should you respond as a reader when you encounter artistic renderings of violence and suffering? The best response is to never stop asking yourself this question. Iris Murdoch, in her essay “Against Dryness” (in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature) argues that “art too lives in a region where all human endeavour is failure…Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling, and defeats our attempts, in W. H. Auden’s words, to use it as magic.” The magic of Hunt is in its feeling-attention to multiple perspectives, to the imaginative space it gives to the thoughts, dreams, testimonies and accounts of women, children, the whale, the other sailors, the tools of the hunt and sailing, the forge. Under each poem’s title, an accompanying reference to a chapter in Moby Dick, a textual touchstone. And nowhere—nowhere—a consolation prize for reading.
By not consoling its reader, Hunt is able to pursue other readerly goods—such as a wonder that is yoked to truth, to the strangeness of human and animal lives. In this wonder lives a critique of relations and power dynamics. Masculinity, labor, the brutal conditions produced by market, whiteness, gender—these concepts and forces are engaged at the level of the poem’s line. In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the whale describes:
You stood on the abyss.
My body dove. It was speckled,
brown, earth-bound. The whiteness
was your own mind looking on.
What this poem is able to do, how it is able to talk about perspective and point of view, is encompassed by the narrative of whale and hunter, of desire and prize. “The paint was a lie,” the whale explains, “but the act of painting was real.” This is one of the best poems I have read addressing the ability of whiteness to negate a vision of others, to shape the world after its own image and act of “perception.”
Ahab white-washes the whale with his mind. It is a sonnet-like ability to do such rich, conceptual work in the space of a single page.
In the poem “Squid,” the whale describes its food,
My food rose in white ghost glory,
sent silence over the water,
came from an under
where forests begin and mountains.
The whale describes its food, its hunger: “the pleasure is / that bite. The skin, the juice that runs, / Disgorge an arm, pulpy mass, cream,” and how it eats “But to survive. / To be alive.” This is a marked difference between whale and human hunter. In the poem’s final line, the whale notes: “You are different: kill and sell,” a condemnation of humankind’s drive for profit and usury, for the hunt of the natural world that results in excess and spoilage.
Hunt and Pricking testify to a poet who moves fluidly through human and literary history with deep range, feeling, and formal dexterity. Each of Cuello’s collections reads as a lyric catalog, gathering an abundance of wreck and loveliness that transgresses the nets of their lines and stanzas.
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