The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero Review by Brent Ameneyro

The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero

Translated by Robin Myers

Review by Brent Ameneyro

ISBN: 978-1-945720-26-0

Paperback

140 pp

Publication Date: May 10, 2022

Cardboard House Press

The Dream of Every Cell pushes beyond the fundamental expectations of a poetry book. This is a collection of eco-poems which balance the personal and emotional with the scientific and intellectual, but it can also be read as a collection of essays with a unified thesis or as a collection of stories with recurring characters.

If viewed as a collection of essays, the thesis can be found on the last line of the poem “Cells”: “I’d like to know if there will be room for all of us.” The speaker often jumps from nature imagery to images of buildings and human-made structures to show the constant battle for space on our planet. “The empire” is portrayed as an invasive species that fights against plants and animals.

We are reminded throughout the collection that “the dream of every cell is to become more cells,” and although this is often an image of hope, it can also be an image of violence. The last stanza of the poem “Aloe Vera,” for example, explains the way humanity often mislabels violence as hope:

Eight years ago, we also learned how a Mexican government in the
1950s had proudly announced the extermination of the wolves: good
news, it claimed, for the land and for farmers.

This constant clash between humans and nature in Guerrero’s poetry shows how humans can be colonial and destructive. However, the speaker often urges themselves and the reader to return to imagination, to an animal state, to a childlike state, all in order to live in accordance with nature. The scientific and the critical is balanced by the playful and poetic.

If viewed as a collection of stories, The Dream of Every Cell introduces a host of different characters. These characters are often pitted against a foil: the biology teacher Ms. Olmedo battles a virus, animals (mostly wolves) struggle to survive the oppressive empire/government, nature (often depicted through date trees, forests, and succulents) fights urbanization.

The speaker grieves the loss of their biology teacher Ms. Olmedo. The battle between Ms. Olmedo and an unnamed virus is a narrative thread that is carried from the start of the collection to the very end. The collection begins in Ms. Olmedo’s classroom, bringing the reader into a child’s perspective:

[One day she had us draw a catalogue of leaf-shapes
using any technique we liked: we love liking!:
watercolor, charcoal, oil, photography, anything, as long
as we treated leaf-shapes as a way to recover ourselves.
As a way to fight against the fear of subtraction and the
loss of large predators: to draw leaves and trees means
to breathe: we like it.]

In this example from the poem “The Shapes of the Leaves,” Guerrero uses play and classroom activities to invite her readers into the child’s perspective. This appears to be done so the use of complex scientific language that comes later is less jarring. The child’s perspective is open to learning and understanding the world in new ways. By beginning the collection from this view, Guerrero invites her readers to consider revisiting their perspectives on nature and how we care for our planet.

As with the idea of the teacher battling the virus, the empire clashing with the wolves is often supported by an analysis of language. Guerrero suggests that the language of the empire is imposed onto nature through classification and binary compartmentalization. This is articulated candidly in the poem “Rivers”:

Naming and controlling riverflows is the work of hydrologists,
geologists, soldiers, and engineers who attend to convenient means
of diverting riverbeds, enclosing them, draining them dry: so that
they’ll conform to flighty shapes and pipelines.

Guadal means river.
Guadalupe is the name for a river of wolves.

Can we imagine a river of wolves lacing through the mesetas
and sheltering streams and creeks and communities of life
communicating in a language that isn’t the language of empire?

In this example, she seems to be saying that the very act of naming things in nature is in fact anti-nature. Nature, from the speaker’s view, is free and flowing, whereas the language of the empire is restricting, even violent.

Lastly, in the battle between nature and urbanization, Guerrero utilizes the image of breathing, as if to say it becomes more difficult to breathe in the polluted, densely populated, human-made cities/habitats. The constant reference to breathing culminates in the poem “Breath”:

although, in the vacant lot next door:
life bustles on
and I grow sappy
and simplistic:
I like to think that if I make
a tree grow we’ll be able to talk
and listen to each other
like this:
shared
breath,
parallel
perspectives:
a wolf, a crab:
mauve anemones:
courage
and an embrace in
an album of the shapes of the leaves in hands

Here, the speaker reminds the reader that the tree exhales and humans inhale. The poet celebrates a vacant lot which represents the absence of production and the empire. A small space where nature flourishes—what might otherwise look like an unkempt plot of land in an otherwise organized, manufactured cityscape—is shown as the most beautiful part of the neighborhood, a beacon of light and hope. The lines “parallel / perspectives” suggests that when humans align with nature, we can work together toward a common goal: to live in harmony, to prove there is in fact enough room for all of us. 

Maricela Guerrero (Mexico City, 1977) is the author of nine poetry collections. El sueño de toda célula (Ediciones Antílope/Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, Mexico City, 2018) won the Clemencia Isaura Prize in 2018. Cardboard House Press published her book Kilimanjaro, translated by Stalina Villareal, in 2018. Guerrero has been a member of Mexico’s prestigious SNCA (National System of Artists). Her work has also been translated into German, Swedish, and French.

Robin Myers (New York City, 1987) is a poet, translator, and essayist. Recent translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books, 2022), Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books, 2021), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions, 2021), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books, 2020), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press, 2020). She lives in Mexico City.

Brent Ameneyro’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Journal, Qu, Terrain.org, Azahares, Hispanic Culture Review, and elsewhere. He has been the recipient of the following awards: 2019 Sarah B. Marsh Rebelo Excellence in Poetry Scholarship, 2020 San Miguel Poetry Week Fellowship, and the 2021 SRS Research Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice.

15 June 2022