The Traffic In Poems

The transatlantic crossing of people and goods shaped nineteenth-century poetry in surprising ways. This book focuses on poetic depictions of exile, slavery, immigration, and citizenship and explores the often asymmetrical traffic between British and American poetic cultures.

Cell Traffic presents new poems and uncollected prose poetry along with selected work from award-winning poet Heid Erdrich's three previous poetry collections. Erdrich's new work reflects her continuing concerns with the tensions between science and tradition, between spirit and body. She finds surprising common ground while exploring indigenous experience in multifaceted ways: personal, familial, biological, and cultural. The title, Cell Traffic, suggests motion and Erdrich considers multiple movements-cellular transfer, the traffic of DNA through body parts and bones, "migration" through procreation, and the larger "movements" of indigenousness and ancestral inheritance.ÊErdrich's wry sensibility, sly wit, and keenly insightful mind have earned her a loyal following. Her point of view is always slightly off center, and this lends a particular freshness to her poetry. The debunking and debating of the science of origins is one of Erdrich's focal subjects. In this collection, she turns her observational eye to the search for a genetic mother of humanity, forensic anthropology's quest for the oldest known bones, and online offers of genetic testing. But her interests are not limited to science. She freely admits popular culture into her purview as well, referencing sci-fi television series and Internet pop-up ads.

Finalist, 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Dark Traffic creates landmarks through language, by which its speakers begin to describe traumas in order to survive and move through them. With fine detail and observation, these poems work in some way like poetic weirs: readers of Kane’s work will see the artic and subarctic, but also, more broadly, America, and the exigencies of motherhood, indigenous experience, feminism, and climate crises alongside the near-necropastoral of misogyny, violence, and systemic failures. These contexts catch the voice of the poems’ speakers, and we perceive the currents they create.

This novel-in-poems chronicles the life of Ziaomei, an immigrant girl haunted by the death of her best friend. Told through a kaleidoscopic braid of stories, letters, and riddles, this collection follows Xiaomei's life as she grows into her sexuality and searches for a way to deal with her complicated histories.

Drawing examples from over 200 English-language and Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals published between January 1855 and October 1901, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the US Press, 1855-1901 argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems are inherently paratextual. The paratextual situation of many newspaper poems (their links to surrounding textual items and discourses), their editorialisation through circulation (the way poems were altered from newspaper to newspaper) and their association and disassociation with certain celebrity bylines, editors and newspaper titles enabled contemporaneous poetic value and taste that, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, were not only sentimental, Romantic and/or genteel. In addition to these important categories for determining a good and bad poem, poetic taste and value were determined, Bonifacio argues, via arbitrary consequences of circulation, paratextualisation, typesetter error and editorial convenience.

POETRY/PLAYS