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Cardboard House Press is a 501c3 nonprofit organization devoted to the creation of spaces and media for cultural, artistic, and literary development. We publish writing, art, and contemporary thought from Latin America and Spain, and host bilingual events, community projects and workshops. Our work serves as a platform to exchange ideas and highlight meanings that stimulate diverse human connections and social actions. All of our publications are bilingual— English and Spanish.
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︎Reviews
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 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 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.”
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.”
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.
“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.
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.
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.
(ESSAY) “Love as a Question of Destination in Augustín Fernández Mallo’s Pixel Flesh” by
Eleanor
Tennyson in
SPAM.
“Letters From Latin America: November 7, 2019.” 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 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 (Maricela Guerrero’s Kilimanjaro, Juan José Rodinás’s Koan Underwater, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s Spinning Mill) reviewed by Clara Atfeld in Kenyon Review:
“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:
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“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.”
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“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”
“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.
“A Report from the Cartonera Collective” by
Fields, Noa/h in
ANMLY:
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“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.”
“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 Circumstance 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 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.”
poetry + community + translation
COMMONPLACE | Hugo García Manríquez | Tr. by NAFTA
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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 | 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
