︎Home
︎Catalog
︎Cartonera
︎Submissions
︎Donate
︎About
︎Contact
︎ ︎ ︎
Cardboard House Press is a 501c3 nonprofit organization founded in 2014 and based in Phoenix, Arizona, dedicated to the creation of Spanish-English bilingual spaces through small-press publishing, community workshops, and bilingual events. We publish Latin American and Spanish poetry in translation, with a focus on innovative contemporary poetry, historical avant-garde, and social poetics. Our work acts as a platform for the exchange of ideas, uplifting new meanings that provoke connection and social action.
︎︎︎
︎Reviews
And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing ︎︎︎
An Invitation by Captivation: A review of Tilsa Otta’s And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing
by Greg Bem in Hopscotch Translation:
“While described as a chapbook, the publication feels holistic and representative of such great energy and experience that “chapbook” hardly covers the work itself. This is a bold new collection of resistance and liberation, barreling down new pathways of sexuality, gender, and love.”
“In this selection, Otta’s speakers are alive and aware and actively moving across the page, dancing, or sitting still marveling at the universe.”
“When the dance floor reverberates elsewhere, Otta’s awe and intimacies are quiet and touching, mellow passions descriptive of the texture of sensuality and the beauty of the commitment to shared space.”
“The poet provides broad strokes that are fleeting and resonant, blurred images that cascade across time and space, lingering like warmth, or like echoes that urge sense through awareness of resonance. Otta’s instructional, if not choral, approach to poetry takes moments of the private, the intimate, and bridges them with intention and care.”
And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing reviewed by Cristina Correa in Action Books:
Tilsa Otta has offered us a vibrant black hole to enter and find ourselves enraptured with And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing. This poetry collection flows to its own beat of queer wonder, interconnectedness, and expansion. Opening with a visual poem that is both map and symbol for the past, present, and future, the poet seems to mark the spot (X) that inspired, inspires, and will inspire in perpetuity an abundance of possibilities (+). As in the poem “Hormone of Darkness” wherein Otta proclaims “I have three X chromosomes but I want + / +++,” alluding to a constructive desire that is vast as it is shameless. Indeed these poems, rendered into English by Honora Spicer, make a reader want more. They invite spacious surrender to the pleasures of connecting with oneself and with others in as much as they lay groundwork for finding a “playground” in a “crazy-sad world.”
Commonplace ︎︎︎
Commonplace
by Hugo García Manríquez reviewed by
Judah Rubin in The Poetry Project:
“Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace approaches the Mexican state as an incomplete allegorical sign. Mexico, as an entity, is inseparable from the sign-system of the militarized world of the war on drugs and the ecocide of late capitalist extractivism.”
“Commonplace is firmly located in this fractured and fracturing totality (“Beside history / our own indexicality”), but, and this is where I find Commonplace to be so brilliant, the text pivots to think with the *Popol Vuh* in its consideration of the more than human world.”
Commonplace by Hugo Garcia Manriquez reviewed by Brent Ameneyro in Los Angeles Review:
“Many poets have said all poetry is political. Hugo García Manríquez takes this idea literally, and to a level unlike any other poetry book I’ve encountered. Manríquez’s Commonplace is an anti-art, anti-subjective, book-length poem that has more weapon specifications and military statistics than poetic utterances.”
“Imagining this book read cover to cover at a poetry reading, I would hear it as part art performance and part political speech. As much as it stands as a work of art, it would equally—if not more so—carry itself as a speech at a political rally.”
Commonplace by Hugo García Manríquez reviewed by Greg Bem in SPREAD:
“Poetry is proxy, a subtext for a radical envisioning of systems of domination from the state. As we read the poet’s lines, we’re told that we are reading the budget of Mexico’s Secretary of Public Security, Secretary of National Defense, Tax Administration Service, and Attorney General. The war machine that is part of the totality is inseparable from poetry; the poet calls forth the absurdity of this inseparation.”
Commonplace by Hugo García Manríquez reviewed by Cindy Juyoung Ok in Poetry Foundation:
“Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace, originally published in Spanish as Lo Común, erases and rearranges an increasingly militarized and nationalized Mexico City. Eight long poems gather fractal impressions of a city, listing military budget statistics, imperiled animal species, and various types of guns imported into Mexico from corporations in the United States and Western Europe.”
“Through repetitions and disintegrations, these recursive poems attempt an original form in which inventory serves as anti-narrative, a willing witness to the collapse of the city’s very architecture.”
Whitney DeVos interviews Hugo García Manríquez in Poetry Magazine: “An Exercise in Autonomy: Hugo García Manríquez on Translation.”
Commonplace by Hugo Garcia Manriquez reviewed by Michael Collins in North of Oxford:
“Hugo Garcia Manríquez begins Commonplace with a unique hybrid of invocation and manifesto, clearly announcing its meta-poetic intentions in the use of both generally conceptual language and semiotic terminology.”
“Manríquez articulates a poetics given life by what have been assumed to be “objects” and “matter” by the perspective of the dominant culture. Poems being cultural products, this revisioning necessitates the degree of self-definition we noted at the opening of the book, in order to differentiate from the inherited cultural expectations of poetry itself.”
Fudekara ︎︎︎
Fudekara by Liliana Ponce reviewed by Roz Naimi in Zyzzyva:
“Ponce finds what is pregnant in recursive, iterative action. She reminds us of how what may seem like mindless repetition might become a pathway to mindfulness. To embody an action over and over allows for endless opportunities to actualize what is at the core of one’s desire.”
Gardens ︎︎︎
Gardens by Carlos Cociña reviewed by Diego Alegría in Latin American Literature Today:
"...masterfully translated by Ian Lockaby, the Chilean author avails himself of the fragmented connection of nine works of poetic prose, anchored at the syntactic level through parataxis to connect physical and psychological gardens, expansive and minuscule, visual and tonal."
The Dream of Every Cell ︎︎︎
“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.”
Contra Natura ︎︎︎
Contra Natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza reviewed by Olivia Lott in Action Books:
“Thanks to translator Anthony Seidman and publisher Cardboard House Press, Hinostroza’s 1971 masterpiece has made its long-anticipated debut in English. Octavio Paz praised its potential to shake Latin American poetry early on, and some compare its risk-taking impact to that of fellow Peruvian César Vallejo’s iconic Trilce (1922). The collection is known for its incorporation of symbols (zodiac signs, mathematic equations, a compass), its multilingualism (English, French, Italian, and Latin, alongside the Spanish), and dense referentiality (Hamlet, the bubonic plague, the Cunningham chess defense, Archibal MacLeish, Anteaus, just in the first poem). This is certainly a difficult text to translate, and Seidman rises to the task. His version crisply shapeshifts to match the fluctuating demands and demanding fluctuations that Hinostroza places on the lyric.”
Contra Natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza reviewed by César Ferreira in Latin American Literature Today:
"The publication of this bilingual edition of Contra Natura (1971)...deserves the highest praise, as it brings the work of one of the most important Peruvian poets of the second half of the twentieth century to an English-speaking audience.”
“Contra Natura is a disturbing book that is full of surprises. The work is a product of a unique grammar and a complex system of signs that creates its own semantic field.”
Contra Natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza reviewed by Greg Bem in North of Oxford:
“At long last, the Peruvian poet Rodolfo Hinostroza’s majestic Contra natura is available to the English-speaking audience. This work is a crucial component of late 20th-century poetry attuned to the modernist collecting, the surrealist melting, and the complex humor that follows the community footsteps of poets throughout South America.”
Contra Natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza reviewed by Irakly Qolbaia in Caesura Magazine:
Though there may currently be no room for literary revelry, I think there is one book a centennial of which we should be, if not celebrating, at least actively contemplating―more than Ulysses, more than Duino Elegies or My Sister, Life, even more than The Waste Land―albeit surely where we are, full circle and back at―is César Vallejo’s Trilce, which hit the world the same year as the abovementioned celestial bodies, and, although less heeded, it might yet prove to be the Poem of that century, and the poem for our own arrested day. But maybe all the works I dropped the titles of, seemingly related by the year of their publication (and the poem we are celebrating in this text, and will get to in a bit, is the poem written by a poet-astrologer, so there can be nothing merely seeming about the dates in our current contemplation) are the works of the counter-nature, Contra Natura, in their contradistinct and unique ways, shedding light on the condition of the human Soul’s alienness to this Earth (Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden, in the words of Georg Trakl, words that seem to epitomize the modern man’s twisted vision of soul’s counter-nature condition).
Boat People ︎︎︎
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Meaghan Coogan in Asymptote:
“Boat People endeavors to document the undocumented, the invisibilized, and the silenced who are lost to the sea.”
“Santos-Febres’s Boat People documents the Black lives lost in the attempt to chase the mirage of the American Dream, in order to combat the silence and absence of archival records and humanizing discourse surrounding Black death, which is often reduced to numbers in a newspaper article or spectacularized violence in a photograph.”
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Katherine Hedeen in Modern Poetry in Translation:
“Thanks to translator Vanessa Pérez-Rosario and the tireless work of independent publisher of poetry in translation Cardboard House Press, U.S. readers are asked to question how borders are defined; to go beyond the anti-immigrant rhetoric of wall-building; to look east rather than south; to think of the sea.”
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Shash Trevett in The Times Literary Supplement:
“Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, the book-length poem possesses a lyrical intensity enfolding centuries of desperate water crossings. It is a migration elegy and an oceanic hymn that mimics the creative and destructive power of the sea.”
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Greg Bem in
Exacting Clam:
“The fatalism is amplified by a swollen language of stories of unacknowledgment and brutal survival: “identity unquestioned / and one more to the sea / a watery wilderness” (35). The poet calls forth the fragmentation of our discourse, at large, around the subject of migration along the margins, of consideration of refugees.”
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Zack Anderson in
Harvard Review:
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Honora Spicer in
World Literature Today:
“Gnashing and disassembling flesh and language at once, “la fauce azul / alafau sea sul,” Pérez-Rosario’s translation sustains this simultaneity and breakdown: “like the yawl that tossed your excess weight / into the blue maw / intothe bluem aw.” This spacing, repetition, reordering of proximity gestures toward bodies opening out in multiple ways, becoming un-numberable, un-indexical, un-categorizable.”
“The Opacity of Language, the Empathy of Translation,”
Aitor Bouso Gavín on Boat People in Hopscotch:
Boat People by Mayra Santos Febres reviewed by
Zoe Contros Kearl in Kenyon Review:
“Mayra Santos-Febres’s collection Boat People, translated by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, addresses the oft-undiscussed topic of undocumented migration in the Caribbean. In a numbered series of poems that are sparse and beautiful and rending, both in form and in content, Santos-Febres creates devastating narratives time and again.”
Carnation and Tenebrae Candle ︎︎︎
“Burning Like Roses: On Marosa Di Giorgio’s Carnation and Tenebrae Candle” by Zack Anderson in Action Books:
“Clavel y Tenebrario / Carnation and Tenebrae Candle by Marosa Di Giorgio, Translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas” by
Juan de Marsilio in
Latin American Literature Today:
Carnation and Tenebrae Candle by Marosa Di Giorgio reviewed by
Honora Spicer in Asymptote:
“The pastoral genre is always political insofar as it concerns the scope of the city as well as the ways that people tend to the edges of the polis. This act of tending is performed again and again in Carnation and Tenebrae Candle, and these habits of interaction between humans and the natural become ways of world-making, which is a prominent impulse of di Giorgio’s. In this collection, translation is another tending—the world-making of repeated care—and Pitas’s translation is best described by a line from the collection: “everything there, meticulous, tender and nearly trembling.”
Carnation and Tenebrae Candle by Marosa Di Giorgio reviewed by Greg Bem in North of Oxford:
Carnation and Tenebrae Candle by Marosa Di Giorgio reviewed by
Rose Bialer in Kenyon Review:
“Through her engagement with di Giorgio’s poetry, Pitas invites a new audience to witness the power of imagination and the possibilities that it offers: the capacity for curiosity both in the quotidian moments and the horrific. Originally published in 1979 during the time of Uruguay’s military dictatorship, Carnation and Tenebrae Candle is a timely translation for contemporary English-speaking readers. In our own tumultuous times, di Giorgio’s words are an immense comfort, showing us the potential for humanity and creation in the face of brutality and destruction.”
Pixel Flesh ︎︎︎
Pixel Flesh by Agustín Fernández reviewed by
Vincent Moreno in
Angel City Review:
“Pixel Flesh is a highly intertextual work that opens up all sorts of hallways and windows into other forms of art, into other texts and disciplines. The references are sometimes direct: Blade Runner, Wittgenstein, Warhol, and pop music, among others, appear in the book as a very eclectic and, in appearance, incongruous amalgam of quotes and allusions that are a trademark of Fernández Mallo’s style. Ultimately, however, it is the reader who holds the key to venture into new doors and corridors. This makes each new reading of the book a new experience, rendering it practically inexhaustible in connotations and suggestiveness.”
Pixel Flesh by Agustín Fernández Mallo reviewed by Greg Bem in Rain Taxi:
“Behind the eyelids or in front of them, the world is awash with information; this information contains patterns and poems, and pushes the field further. Pixel Flesh is fascinating as a paper book that relays concepts more often suited for screens. Calling into question so many aspects of our postmodern reality, Mallo has written a book for the present. It may not read comfortably, but it is, like the black holes regularly mentioned, both vast and dense at once.”
Pixel Flesh by Agustín Fernández Mallo reviewed by
Honora Spicer in
World Literature Today:
“The translation becomes itself a rich commentary on the representation of fractal self-similarity. Ludington explores how to knowingly translate oddness in the original, exposing the valences of fractal deriving from the Latin for ‘broken’ or ‘fractured.’”
“Mallo’s interest in writing through cultural detritus informs this approach of using a set of trite tropes that generate a loop and ultimately demonstrate the deterioration of meaningful human connection in the face of technological static.”
Pixel Flesh by Agustín Fernández Mallo reviewed by
AM Ringwalt in Kenyon Review:
“Ludington’s translation, through its verbal re-presentation of Mallo’s circling poetics, effectively intensifies Mallo’s project, demonstrating a generative absence beyond memory and beyond language. Everything is unsettled; from this site of unsettledness, where even language is without center, Ludington translates around the impossibility of grasping absence.”
(ESSAY) “Love as a Question of Destination in Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Pixel Flesh” by
Eleanor
Tennyson in
SPAM:
Garrett Phelps on
Agustín Fernández Mallo’s
Pixel Flesh in Asymptote:
“He’s an Impressionist, in other words, albeit a hypermodern variant whose range includes the landscapes of cyberspace and information overload. As subjects these are slippery and mercurial, but Mallo adapts to unplanned contingencies like a plein air painter would to weather.”
Room in Rome ︎︎︎
Letters From Latin America: Room in Rome by Jorge Eduardo Eielson reviewed by Leo Boix in Morning Star:
“Eielson weaves personal history with geographic location, homosexual desire with longing, past and future, in a fashion that is as playful as it is profound.”
“Nota Benes, Autumn 2019,” World Literature Today:
“Room in Rome captures Eielson’s remarkable sensitivities to the places and cultures in which he immersed himself, and this new translation reintroduces one of Latin America’s most important wordsmiths to the English-speaking world.”
Room in Rome by Jorge Eduardo Eielson reviewed by César Ferreira in Latin American Literature Today:
“Room in Rome (1954), now appearing in a bilingual edition with David Shook’s magnificent translation in English, a prologue by Mario Vargas Llosa and an epilogue by Martha Canfield, is both a showcase of Eielson’s poetic excellence, and an individual and collective reflection on his exile in Europe.”
“Slipknots: Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s ‘Room in Rome,’ Translated from Spanish by David Shook” by
Olivia Lott in
Reading in Translation:
“The question most pertinent for Eielson’s and Shook’s poems, however, is what vanishes for the exile? What knots fall apart when tensed? What attempts to tie something together, to re-articulate slip away, drop out of reach?”
“The Singing Knots of Jorge Eduardo Eielson: Room in Rome in Review” by
Sergio Sarano in Asymptote:
Cartonera Collective Series ︎︎︎
Cartonera Collective Series (Maricela Guerrero’s Kilimanjaro, Juan José Rodinás’s Koan Underwater, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s Spinning Mill) reviewed by Clara Atfeld in Kenyon Review:
"All of these books focus on redefinition in some form, making them enchanting translated work, as that redefinition has had to take shape in two different languages. The books themselves are beautiful, handmade pieces, that fit the project of the poetry. Kilimanjaro folds out into an accordion, creating the largest track illustrated in the book. Spinning Mill and Koan Underwater shift the orientation of the words on the page, shifting the orientation of the reader to the words, to poetry, to translation, all at once. The Cartonera Collective’s project makes not just the literature but the publication process itself a multicultural translation."
“Legna Rodriguez Iglesias focuses on redirecting logic, taking the reader through a logical sequence with seemingly illogical steps...The poetry focuses on gender, love, and race, through the lenses of absurdity and honesty.”
“Cardboard Conscious: Translation in Community” by
Kelsi Vanada in
Reading in Translation:
![]()
“The poems honor process—the process of textile work, the process of women defining themselves and seeking equality in a society dominated by the patriarchy (...) And the book shows off its process, too: in the waxed thread that holds the pages together, the decorative knots embroidered in deep pink thread on the cover, and in Seligmann’s translation process and choices placed right next to the original.”
![]()
“Kilmanjaro is nothing if not a long list-rant against capitalism and the forces that make people cogs in a machine—and if that sounds negative, good. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable”
“A Report from the Cartonera Collective” by
Fields, Noa/h in
ANMLY:
![]()
“I allowed the surreal, associative drift of Rodinás’s poems to wash over me like a dream (...) Rodinás’s koans resurface from underwater logic, ripple with doublings and eery (eary?) recurrences in musical sequence. A hearty recommendation for Koan Underwater: yet another hit from Cardboard House Press.”
Lyric Poetry is Dead
︎︎︎
“An Interview with Robin Myers, Translator of Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg” by Heather Lang in The Literary Review.
“~Notes on a Journey to the Ever-Dying Lands~” Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg reviewed by Arturo Desimone in ANMLY:
“Fortunately, Lyric Poetry is Dead quickly reveals itself as a protest—only half-cynical, elsewhere tender—against the hegemonic and academic forces of antipoetry, making it in places a genuinely antagonistic collection.”
Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg reviewed by Madeline Vardell in The Arkansas International:
“Lyric poetry becomes both the vehicle for Zaidenwerg to reimagine many histories and allude to other literary greats, and the poetic subject and star of her own legends. Just so, Lyric Poetry Is Dead is waiting to rise up like Lazarus and delight you over and over again.”
Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg reviewed by Paul Guillén in Latin American Literature Today:
“Zaidenwerg uses tropes of traditional poetry and breaks them like someone who is rummaging, like an investigative poet.”
“Lyric Poetry Is Dead: The Flourishing Obituary of Ezequiel Zaidenwerg” by
Bill Mohr in Koan Kinship.
Testimony of Circumstances
︎︎︎
“Rebel Poetry: Rodrigo Lira’s Testimony of Circumstances in Review” by
Garett Phelps in
Asymptote:
“Needless to say, all of Lira’s neologisms, wordplay, intertextuality, and assonance-based rhythms would cost even the best translator a pint of blood. Ours, however, are the best of the best and have pulled off an English that’s as shining, breathless, and combustible as its source. It’s often just as inventive, too.”
Testimony of Circumstances by Rodrigo Lira reviewed in The Arkansas International:
“Lira may have written in the 70s, in response to the oppressive climate of his own government, but hold his poetry up and it is an unnerving lens for the present day, America and elsewhere. We should all take up the pen, like Lira, write against the suffocation of the factory, but first, turn to Testimony of Circumstances, enter into conversations with Lira and beat back our solitary sub-lives, choose to hear, more than survive.”
Testimony of Circumstances by Rodrigo Lira reviewed by
John Venegas in Angel City Review:
“What Testimony of Circumstances represents then is a kind of pseudo-biography, a fascinating, disarming, and brilliant cross section of a life dedicated to literature. Everything is on display here – Lira’s politics, his contentious rivalries with those he wanted to regard as friends and/or peers, his utterly merciless inner voice – all of it. There is a richness of perspective present that caught me rather off guard.”
Testimony of Circumstances by Rodrigo Lira reviewed by
Jasmine V. Bailey in Waxwing Literary Journal: American Writers & International Voices.
Album of Fences
︎︎︎
Album of Fences by Omar Pimienta reviewed by Kelsi Vanada in Kenyon Review:
“That’s the strength of this hybrid photo-poem collection—it humanizes a complex place that is a hot-button issue for many. For Pimienta, it’s home.”
“Nota Benes, Autumn 2018,” World Literature Today Album of Fences:
“This collection is a fascinating combination of poetry (presented in both Spanish and English en face) and photography portraying the duality of living on the US/Mexican border through personal anecdotes and photos. With little punctuation or capitalization, the pieces feel dusty yet hurried, as if rushing to convey meaning against a backdrop of transnational urgency.”
Garrett Phelps on Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Pixel Flesh in Asymptote:
“He’s an Impressionist, in other words, albeit a hypermodern variant whose range includes the landscapes of cyberspace and information overload. As subjects these are slippery and mercurial, but Mallo adapts to unplanned contingencies like a plein air painter would to weather.”
poetry + community + translation
MUSIC NOTEBOOK | Mariela Dreyfus | Tr. by Gabriel Amor
In writing as tough as it is visionary, Mariela Dreyfus scores the “landscape / both real and dreamed” and summons a haunting lyric choreography, in conversation with everyone from César Vallejo and Carlos Oquendo de Amat to Mallarmé, Pina Bausch, and the Afro-Peruvian drum. This notebook contains notes from many undergrounds (Lima, New York, the self), developing processually into an expansive poetics of pain, thirst, flight, the mother’s womb, the girl’s rebellion, the lover’s body, the burning city. Translator Gabriel Amor honors the pulsing rhythms of the poet’s aural daydream without sacrificing the elegance of her knotty syntax, its “prenatal impulse” in search of “the memory of a harmony that / predates us.” Music Notebook is a major work by an essential poet of our Latin American New York.—Urayoán Noel
POETECHNICS | Yaxkin Melchy | Tr. by Ryan Greene
Yaxkin Melchy's Poetechnics is an invitational poetic provocation that both transforms and transcends the traditional categorization(s) of poetry and science. Drawn from the first two full-length books in his decade-in-the-making project, THE NEW WORLD, the sci-tech poems in Poetechnics celebrate Melchy's lyrically rich and formally inventive approach to disciplinary blurring. This wonderstruck collection, dancing from the depths of the ocean to the furthest reaches of outer space, traverses circuit diagrams, binary sequences, textbook figures, and more. Here, in these thrumming bilingual pages (and their accompanying digital "transfluxions"), we witness Melchy in action, kinetic and expansive, as he invites us to dream alongside him toward "a scientific imaginary rooted in the heart.”
--- ---AND SUDDENLY I WAS JUST DANCING | Y DE PRONTO SOLO BAILABA | Tilsa Otta | Tr. by Honora Spicer
Tilsa Otta is one of my favorite poets, and Honora Spicer’s translations capture what is luminous about Otta’s work. This collection is nocturnal punk graffiti. She manages to make a voice that’s a little IDGAF, a little mystical into a hypnotic pulse radiating out like a bat signal in the shape of her girlfriend’s puppy. And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing is the balm for your mercury in retrograde. Bring your satellite.―Carmen Giménez Smith
x+x+x+, which is to say, the “x” that in Spanish marks out the gender binary can wheel, in Honora Spicer’s translations as much as in Tilsa Otta’s poems, into the “+” of possibility, the unapologetic celebration of appetite, savoring the spit we share in articulating the more that is already here. These are poems that call us into the “wild lyceum” where our gorgeous animality tunes its collective attention to the elegance of its own music. Otta and Spicer lead us in a “dance / supposedly obscene / that assures / Humanity’s continuance,” which is to say x+x+x+―Farid Matuk
COMMONPLACE | LO COMÚN | Hugo García Manríquez | Tr. by NAFTA
Commonplace is a literary topos of the natural world, a compilation of the environmental crisis made with an eye so wide that it includes the Popul Vuh, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the budget of SEDENA. This makes it a nature poem that is in no way nostalgic, a political poem that is in no way nationalist, and one of the most moving poems I’ve read in a long time.―Juliana Spahr
These poems both catalog and interrupt contact between the military and the ecological in everyday contexts: how traces left by the glands of a white-tailed deer and petals from bright yellow creosote also touch Colts and Glocks and ion scanners. In doing so, they ask me to confront whether there remains anything private in my so-called private life. As García Manríquez writes, “When we read literature / we read the budget of the Mexican army.” And in that budget, we may spy the poetics of our own elegies. This compact, but frightening, book invites us to consider “The collapse of abstraction / as another form of freedom.”―Divya Victor
FUDEKARA | Liliana Ponce | Tr. by Michael Martin Shea
The work's evanescence, its ‘not being,' the composition of the void, of the space between the lines, is the art, the mastery of Liliana Ponce in Fudekara, to make present what is felt, the other reality within ‘reality,’ released by and through the brush. Her admirable reticence is a bolt of world-opening lightning.—Cecilia Vicuña
In Liliana Ponce's dekatesseral Fudekara, nimbly translated by Michael Martin Shea, all thought emits a cosmic gesture and the writing hand traces an inviting, inkwet path to the negative sublime.—Joyelle McSweeney
THE DREAM OF EVERY CELL | EL SUEÑO DE TODA CÉLULA | Maricela Guerrero | Tr. by Robin Myers
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
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
BOAT PEOPLE | Mayra Santos-Febres | Tr. by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
Awaiting Major Events invites us on a trip in space and time—to other rivers, other lands, where childhood and present are “tied like a knot.” Kasztelan writes with the five senses, delicately, the way you disentangle one plant from another, and so climb into fluctuation between the domestic and multiple “theres,” between the I and the “layers of other things,” between her own writing and references to the writing of others (Elizabeth Bishop, Ricardo Molinari, Irene Gruss). We arrive at the end of the book like we arrive home from a journey, “saturated with stimuli.” “What lingers after a trip?” The real possibility of getting back, or getting back to the glimmer of certain images: the filigree of a cameo, the broken branch of an olive tree, the language—with the skillful translation of Maureen Shaughnessy—of a forest that brings together the infinite and the consciousness of limit.—Silvina López Medin
