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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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A Little Pretty Personality
Una pequeña personalidad linda

Berta García Faet

Translated from the Spanish by Kelsi Vanada


A wild romp of an epic, this book sings to us of unperceived formations of language and culture. A Little Pretty Personality summons writings from across eras to assay a communal hymn that examines historical trajectories and constructions of romance, love and gender. Its poems reveal a language in constant fracture, which amalgamates wordplay, archaisms, allusions ranging from the Quijote to pop lyrics, and re-writings of poems by Federico García Lorca, César Vallejo and Alejandra Pizarnik. "Squirting multiplications," this book leaves "stretch marks" on language, as a voice emerges between echoes and caresses of past lives. As a wandering narrator announces, shifting across landscapes, "don’t be afraid / of not having the keys."



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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
318 pages| ISBN 978-1-945720-45-1
September 9, 2026 | Design: Mutandis
The publication of this book was made possible thanks to the support of the Poetry Foundation


 Praise 

“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


Una cosa bella es una alegría eterna, as John Keats told Julio Cortazar, who told us; and Berta García Faet's A Little Pretty Personality is the proof. Dipping into this book is like discovering a bathtub of champagne at the party; it's like kneeling on soft moss to imbibe from a sacred spring the rippling eternality of a gold neutrino lit with Mallarme's cosmic attentiveness to bracelets, fans and interior decor. Appearing alongside Kelsi Vanada's English translations as in matching, triumphant and virtuosic party dresses, these poems will give you what you need: joy—forever.—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles


Berta García Faet creates a language all her own. Reading her feels like rubbing a magic lamp and finding something very old, but also new, brilliant, shiny, and even tasty! Kelsi Vanada's translation finds the peculiar, points at the unexpected, and lands at literature.—Violeta Gil, author of Andábamos maravillados



 Author 

Berta García Faet was born in Valencia, Spain, in 1988. She is a poet and translator and the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the “Premio Nacional de Poesía Joven Miguel Hernández” in 2018 (the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s top poetry prize for poets under 31). She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and has published ten books in Spanish—nine poetry collections and an essay on the reading and writing of poetry. They are all published by La Bella Varsovia, with the exception of the essay El arte de encender las palabras (Barlin, 2023). Poetry: Corazonada (2023), Una pequeña personalidad linda (2021), Corazón tradicionalista. Poesía 2008-2011 (2018), Los salmos fosforitos (2017), La edad de merecer (2015), Fresa y herida (2011), Introducción a todo (2011), Night club para alumnas aplicadas (2009), and Manojo de abominaciones (2008).


 Translator 

Kelsi Vanada is a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, the author of the poetry collection Optional Saint (Bench Editions, 2025) and the chapbook Rare Earth (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and the translator (from Spanish and Swedish) of seven books of poetry and creative nonfiction: Day’s Fortune by Carlo Acevedo (Sundial House Press, 2025), Basket of Braids by Natalia Litvinova (Shearsman Books, 2024), United Left by Álvaro Lasso (Eulalia Books, 2024), The Visible Unseen by Andrea Chapela (Restless Books, 2022), Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems by Marie Silkeberg (Terra Nova Press, 2021), Into Muteness by Sergio Espinosa (Veliz Books, 2020), and The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet (Song Bridge Press, 2018). She is Senior Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, AZ.