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Founded in 2014, Cardboard House Press is a space for dialogue between poetics that investigate social, environmental, political, cartographic and linguistic formations. Cardboard House Press publishes poetry in translation in the United States by Latin American and Spanish authors and prints books through diverse processes, including letterpress, block printing, stencil, screenprinting and digital. A series of our publications are made by hand in community workshops. All our books are bilingual.

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The Dream of Every Cell
El sueño de toda célula

Maricela Guerrero
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers

Designed by Mutandis

Poetry
Bilingual edition
Paperback
140 pages
ISBN 978-1-945720-26-0
May 10, 2022

Praise

“Encouragement is a round warm form of resistance,” writes Maricela Guerrero, as if describing her own project. In these powerful and necessary poems, beautifully rendered by Robin Myers, Guerrero reveals a worldwide cellular consciousness that generously offers us rivers of leaves and wolves to feed and clean the heart and its languages. Building furrows of words and speaking in tree, Guerrero creates a poetry to shelter in. In her capable hands and tongue we are carried in rivers of nourishment. It’s exactly what the world needs, and I am flooded with gratitude. For joy, for grace, for tenderness, for righteous grief and its acknowledgment, for inspiration and sustenance, you must read this book.—Eleni Sikelianos

Maricela Guerrero leads us right back into the classrooms where many of us first encountered the scientific language that opened us to (and distanced us from) the plant kingdom. And she leads us out again, forcing us to confront the territories of devastation before she introduces us, suddenly small, into the cells, the sap in the trees, the shapes of the leaves. Everything pulses and everything shines there: language, connections among the elements, protest. What wise, warm writing by Maricela Guerrero, and what a marvelous English translation by Robin Myers, a poet herself. An essential voice in the eco-poetry being written within the Spanish language today.—Cristina Rivera Garza

Maricela Guerrero’s The Dream of Every Cell is one of the great collections of the Anthropocene, a bold literary work that captures the complexity and urgency of science and nature in poetic form. In Robin Myers’ skilled translation, one of the major works of contemporary Mexican poetry finds new life and new forms in the English language. The Dream of Every Cell is the perfect bilingual book, a major intervention in the poetic tradition of both languages.—Ignacio Sánchez Prado

A beautiful book filled with images of nature, memory, and life itself. The natural world unfolds in Guerrero’s language, returning to childhood in the figure of Ms. Olmedo, and goes on to gorgeously depict a world in which political reality, its urban forms, its interpretations, collide with nature. A lovely book. I know I’ll be seeking out more of Guerrero’s work. Highly recommended.—Julieta Venegas

If the latest discoveries have shown us the complex networks of communication among plants, Maricela Guerrero's poetry reveals not only this dialogue, but also the creation and development of language and the contact it makes possible: resignifying the linguistic realm through this capacity to realign the world; to remember and recover the wisdom of women kin, teachers, and the language of nature; and to experience the body as a means of understanding our relationship with the world around us.—Mónica Nepote

Guerrero metabolizes the language of science with the languages of the environment to teach us lessons in attentiveness, care, and healing. Moreover, she protests ongoing extraction and calls us to protect the “lungs of the earth.” Reading this book felt like dreaming with cells, wolves, trees, and rivers in a place where “respiramos juntos” (“we breathe together”). This bilingual collection is a profound expression of Mexican eco-poetry.—Craig Santos Perez

Author

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.

Translator

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.

Reviews

**“Dreams of Cells and Wolves.”Constance Hansen on The Dream of Every Cell in Poetry Northwest:**

“The book calls for dissent, mourning “the biodiversity that suffers the kinds of transfers calculated in agroeconomic offices where no dissenting voices sound.” Yet, a generous spirit enumerates what forms such dissent might take; like the wolves they so often reference, these poems are playful yet fierce.”

“The Dream of Every Cell is a manifesto of caretaking, caregiving, and all that is lifegiving; it reaches for a common language that can restore the world to wholeness.”

The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero reviewed by Alec Schumacher in Make Lit:

“The poems themselves seem to grow from previous ones, building a particular lexicon that becomes enriched with each poem. Aloe vera, wolves, birch and fir, anemone, subtraction, breath, nitrogen, empire: these words become more tangible as each poem gives shape to their meaning in Guerrero’s diction. The book reveals itself as organism, as a structure of interrelated cells that communicate and feed each other. And just as biological information is imprinted during the process of reproduction, the book is a space that receives poetic information.”

“Every translation effectively constitutes an interpretation, yet Myers translation flows openly like a parallel river to Guerrero’s Spanish, nimbly bending between registers following Guerrero’s odyssey through cells, roots, chemical processes, and human relationships.”

The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero reviewed by Bret Ameneyro in Los Angeles Review:

“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.”

The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero reviewed by Greg Bem in North of Oxford:

“The Dream of Every Cell is a cunning array of poetic explorations, and it is a book of dreams. It is a book of longing and the imagination.”

“Guerrero’s collection, (...) feels as much a collection of poetry as it does a document of rebellion, a manifesto, a toolkit on how to think about connectedness and ecology.It is a book about individuals as much as it is about systems. It is a book about personal commitment as much as it is a book about relationships.”