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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.
︎Newsletter
poetics / print / formations
“Poof”—!—and welcome, reader—to the peculiar magic of Berta García Faet's A Little Pretty Personality, overflowing with playful, subversive feminist wonder. It will grab you by the hand and have you swimming through intellectual and sensual realms alike, with dazzling aplomb, artful moxie, and a witty, flickering tongue. In translation by Kelsi Vanada, you can trust that the translator is in on it. There are faux-neo-archaic overtones: not timeless, but all over time. The uniqueness of this flavor of strident resistance is like no other, the book acting as testament to what it feels like to forge one’s very own relationship to language. To boot: “I’m going to die and that’s magical.”—Sawako Nakayasu, author of Pink Waves
Declaration of Independence
Declaración de Independencia
Ezequiel Zaidenwerg
Translated into Spanish by Hernán Bravo Varela
Brilliantly, Ezequiel Zaidenwerg inverts and perverts the Declaration of Independence, somehow making it a truer version of itself.—Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book
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Unfolding original syntax to probe the pathology of American masculinity, Ezequiel Zaidenwerg enacts a rigorous exercise of constraint and reconfiguration, spanning the spectral distance from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump. The poem exposes the uncanny resonances of the 18th-century lexicon, where terms like “migrations” and “trade” already vibrate with the systemic violence of the present. By recasting the rejection of the Tyrant into a frantic address to a scornful lover and absent father, this Declaration fashions a counter-epic of lyric urgency. Against the original’s certainty, this remix leaves us with “no self-evident truths in separation / but foreign bodies against each other.”
JAWS
tiburón
Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza
Translated by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier
Fusing lyric with documentary material, playful with scenes of ominous oceanic gloom, Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza has constructed a kind of poetic aquarium that rewrites Hollywood horror within the deep currents of international commerce. Aswim in night terrors and dark foreboding, JAWS circles its prey, quietly sneaking up on readers entranced by the rocking waves of its verse, creatively co-translated by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier. If “to tooth means to cling to the world,” then JAWStakes a big bite out of reality, jumping off the screen and out of its pen, leaving this uncanny literary account in its wake.—David Buuck, author of SITE CITE CITY
ANTUCO
Carlos Soto Román & Carlos Cardani Parra
Translated by Judah Rubin
Chilean military training, “whiteout conditions,” masculinity, windchill factors… Antuco epitomizes an ideal union of political critique and poetic craft. This incessant and inescapable narrative builds with the fury of the storm itself that took the lives of 44 conscripts atop a frigid stratovolcano. Cardani Parra and Soto Román have erected a new monument of words that unrelentingly condemns the necropolitics of military command and control.—Mark Nowak, author of Social Poetics
Carlos Cardani Parra and Carlos Soto Román tell this story through what was left behind—military manuals, maps, weather indices, news headlines, survivors' testimony—and through these documents chart how nationalism is often made out of the bodies the nation state fails to protect.—Juliana Spahr, author of Ars Poeticas
Lyric and typographic experimentation (as well as a deft translation by Judah Rubin) contribute to an unforgettable and haunting testimonial. “Do not stop. Do not pause./ Do not help. Eyes straight,” the conscripts are told. In this extraordinary book, their plight resounds eerily into our present as we hurl blindly towards a litany of equality preventable disasters.—Susan Briante, author of 13 Questions for the Next Economy
Red Seed: Poems for Luno
Tsitsokgo talhtsí: kamaxanatliw papa'
Semilla roja: Poemas para Luno
Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez
Translated by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos
Through a voice at once intimate and collective, Lucas Juárez expands the powerful presence of Tutunakú roots to open up territories and to interweave desirous bodies, dream relationships, and the memories of women ancestors. This beautiful translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, in a precious handmade edition, affirms the trilingual (Tutunakú, Spanish and English) as an ethical strategy of listening to and translating the world. Red Seed collects twelve poems of women's sexualities and spirits in which body, language and territory are political spaces that Indigenous memory expands within and renews.—Maricela Guerrero, author of The Dream of Every Cell
Anthem of Evaporated Tears
El deber del pan
Xavier Valcárcel de Jesús
Translated by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Xavier Valcárcel’s El deber del pan struck me with full force upon publication—“changed” feels far too slight. Like many, I came to read it as a testament to a life lived and a life still living and set ablaze by our own conflagrations. In the conspiracy of translation, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera kneads Valcárcel’s violence and tenderness, its intimacy and flight, extending the book’s position as an indelible landmark in our literature. It sings with generous compassion, in English as it does in Spanish—not only with fealty, but with profound care. Here is the work of our hands, which nourishes us and must continue to feed. This book is sustenance and provocation, opening our eyes to the tender, brutal realities we carry within us, and through which we are made.—Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, author of The Life Assignment
Bodies Found in Various Places
Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes
Elvira Hernández
Translated by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher
Elvira Hernández wrote her poem “The Chilean Flag” after she herself had been detained and tortured by the dictatorship for not complying with its lies. While Chileans were trained to look the other way, to go quiet by this terror, Elvira Hernández wrote a poem that could not be printed. Yet, the poem escaped like a prisoner and began circulating in Xeroxes, from hand to hand, until ten years later it was finally printed in Buenos Aires. In Elvira Hernández’s poetry, each line restores the right of words to speak. Each word becomes a healer, a prayer for a wounded, enslaved humanity forced to obey the rule of profit over life.—Cecilia Vicuña, author of Spit Temple
Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress
Diario de una costurera proletaria
Victoria Guerrero-Peirano
Translated by Anastatia Spicer and Honora Spicer
In this beautifully woven translation, Victoria Guerrero’s Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress is a vindication of our mothers and grandmothers, who toiled in the dark, sewing and knitting, and of all the women in factories trying to satisfy our hunger for fast fashion. With each line, Guerrero rips through the seams of sexist and classist distinctions that elevate fine art above handicraft, professors above factory workers, and writers above seamstresses. From the luminous frayed threads emerge the shared silences and rage of these women, which, woven together, form a sturdy but fluid textile that invites us to consider and acknowledge the price of their invisible labor.—Rosa Alcalá, author of YOU
César Moro’s The Equestrian Turtle joins Alice Rahon’s Shapeshifter and Joyce Mansour’s Emerald Wounds in making available in English important work written under Breton’s influence but excluded from Surrealism’s official history. In this document of romantic devotion and erotic obsession, Moro offers his own “delirious, sublime interpretation of reality,” a sensorium as open to “The total loss of speech of breath” as to “The fine, secluded odor of your armpits.” Bary’s and Quispe’s marvelous translations honor the “shattered economy” of the love affair while also admitting us into the felt presence of Moro’s beloved with his “fabulous, smoky mane.” Lit by love’s “incendiary body,” these queer poems burn with hallucinatory and rhapsodic immediacy.—Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
String Theory
Teoría de cuerdas
Karen Villeda
Translated by NAFTA
String Theory gripped me from start to finish: I surfaced, gasping. In this book-length poem in fragments, Villeda invents an investigative poetics. It is not an attempt at resurrection, no, but a lyric diary that spins around an absence, a mystery, a haunting, an attempt “to reap my unname in the bone marrow,” even as it remains impossible to discern whether the author’s namesake took her own life or lost it to violence within a context of femicides. String Theory possesses the candor, captivating musicality, and willingness to gaze into the darkness of Alejandra Pizarnik, Isabel Zapata, Sara Uribe, Diana del Angel, Dolores Dorantes. Much praise to NAFTA for conjuring an astonishing version of this book in English, with propulsive syntax and searing diction that manages, magically, to resonate with the melody of the Spanish.—Rachel Galvin, author of Uterotopia
Dark Night of the Body
Noche oscura del cuerpo
Jorge Eduardo Eielson
Translated by Shook
Dark Night of the Body showcases Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s poetic abilities at the peak of his powers. Hidden for years in the silence of a drawer, these poems were written in Rome in 1955 but only published in their definitive form in 1989. Querying the poet’s deepest identities, this collection reflects on the precariousness of the body by dismantling its materiality. Eielson guides us simultaneously through pleasure, pain, and play, as he redefines the limits of his biological condition, gender, and political/poetical pronouncements. Brilliantly translated by Shook, this bilingual edition of Dark Night of the Body proves essential to understanding the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists.
