Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems by Heid E. Erdrich (review)

Identity and blood have long been central concerns in Native literature. Many of the works of the early Native renaissance period explore this issue through a male protagonist who leaves home and struggles to return, which suggests that Indigenous struggle can be resolved around the male body. More recently authors such as Thomas King, LeAnne Howe, and Louise Erdrich have focused on the female body. Heid E. Erdrich's new work, Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems, keeps the female body, especially the mother, at the center of her consideration of these issues and the text. Cell Traffic is a collection of poetry and prose comprising new, collected, and selected pieces from previously published works. It is a text that delves into the complexities of identity, love, and relationships by bringing together worlds that often seem contradictory.

Erdrich explores complex issues at the intersections of self-reflection, love, and the maternal body. The prose piece, "Two Sides," tells the story of a woman who refuses, for unstated reasons, to help someone she loves but continues to help others she does not. The woman struggles with the anxieties and expectations of life as a mother and lover and deals with the demands coming from multiple male characters, such as a husband, children, and an unnamed "he." Furthermore, "When they Find Each Other On Facebook" is a poem that shows two people, at least one in a committed relationship, rekindle a past relationship on the seemingly disconnected world of Facebook. Erdrich suggests that impersonal online communication allows people to forget the weight of words and their responsibility for what they say. Readers might enjoy comparing this poem to Sherman Alexie's "The Facebook Sonnet." Additionally she offers line-by-l ine translations of poems from English to Ojibwe and then back to English to show the tension and shifting meanings that occur between the two languages. Yet Cell Traffic is a difficult text to narrow down to brief descriptions and themes such as identity, genetics, and gender, even though such themes are present throughout the text. The best way to do justice to a book made of poems is to admire the multifaceted beauty and truth in its parts, because only by understanding the parts can a reader comprehend the whole. Therefore, this review offers a few close readings of selected poems in the collection.

The first section of Cell Traffic, "Chimeras," focuses mainly on the fairly new scientific idea of cell trafficking, which is the transfer not of DNA but actual genetically unique cells between mothers and their children while they are still in the womb. Children carry these cells throughout their lives, and mothers pass them on to their children, as well as transferring the cells of their mothers and their grandmothers going back generations, perhaps forever. The first poem of the section, "Thrifty Gene, Lucky Gene: For Asignak," introduces issues of genetics, movement, and ancestral connections. Erdrich reminds Rabbit, a frequent character throughout the collection, that Ojibwe stories have always articulated and constructed knowledge of distinct familial bonds. In other words their stories narrate and suggest a deep ancestral bond already, so it's not like Ojibwe People need scientific narratives to explain their relationships to each other. The poem alludes to the double helix, a genetic model popular in contemporary science, which Erdrich describes as the spiral of destiny and chance that carries the code of life. Hence, Erdrich draws a connection between Rabbit and her origin, tied through "fate," by funneling two different worlds, the Ojibwe and the Western. Ojibwe people have known about ancestral links through their stories for generations and generations. So the coming together of the Ojibwe knowledge system and scientific storytelling becomes a process of healing within the text. Erdrich is not paying attention to the differences but to the similarities and how these two worlds can come together in a way that is not...