Traces of DNA by Elizabeth Esris

Traces of DNA has its genesis in the notion that in everyday encounters, individuals come in contact with the genetic data of others. This exchange of invisible identity is a compelling metaphor for humanity’s need to recognize how our lives are interwoven. While rooted in generations of family as far back as the second World War and Vietnam, this debut collection touches upon connections made in the experience of living in a world that is imperfect and everchanging. #DNA #World War II #Vietnam #family #poetry #travel #memory #Autism #history

Elizabeth Esris taught English in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for more than twenty-five years and urged her students to write, revise, and value their voices. Concurrently, she wrote and published poetry, prose, and librettos for two operas.

“We hope our DNA remains on everything we touch,” Elizabeth Esrisproclaims past the midpoint of her wonderful collection, Traces of DNA. It is an alluring concept, the idea that instead of vanishing from this earth when our time is up, we can live on, leaving a part of ourselves in both the public and private places we come upon. And in return we pick up the DNA strands of others, as they live on in us. I love the elegant sense of movement I encounter in an Elizabeth Esris poem—the way “pearl petals and cherry/cleave to the tree/before stippling windshields/and blanketing the ground”; the way “pear blossoms against a branch/quicken in the April chill.” As readers we are drawn to family relationships: daughter to father, sister to brother, daughter to mother and grandmother—the red cape, with its strands of DNA, drawn securely across the poet’s shoulders. Traces of DNA, in its ransacking of memory, its search for lost voices and faces, is a tender and affirming book. It reminds us of our connectedness to one another—even through “the final letting go.”

–Joseph Chelius, author of Playing Fields

The articles that Elizabeth Esris has contributed to France Revisited, the travel site that I publish, lay bare the intensity of her emotional connection with historical sites of human suffering. In Traces of DNA, Elizabeth sets aside her passport to revisit with similar intensity the harsh realities of childhood and family. It is a journey that demonstrates her longing to find in the beauty of nature glimpses of relationships with father, mother, brother, grandmother, children. Frequently, she finds connections in the natural world, as when she sees an instance of beauty in her mother’s hard life in pear blossoms that resemble the pearl comb in her mother’s hair or when her inability to understand the needs of a child in “On The Spectrum” leads her to remark “how lovely that a cactus survives from within.” Throughout her work, Elizabeth Esris inspects human realities to look deeply at the traces that remain and that spread with every touch and breath and word.

–Gary Lee Kraut, author and editor of France Revisited (francerevisited.com)