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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. To date we have published authors from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain and Uruguay.

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︎Reviews

Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Zack Anderson in Harvard Review:

“Boat People joins a lineage of poignant works exploring the drift between borders and the constructedness of citizenship, ranging from the documentary (Heimrad Bäcker’s Seascape) to the epic (Caroline Bergvall’s Drift) to the elegiac (Asiya Wadud’s Syncope). Like these other works, Boat People is so impactful because its capaciousness and ambiguity only sharpens the reader’s sense of devastation.”

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:

“As Pérez-Rosario brilliantly puts it, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border and the Atlantic, and the ecological and debt crisis in Puerto Rico, these poems have ‘the power to move readers in ways that statistics cannot.’”

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:

“It is a mutant-like transformation of time and space; it is ideally surrealist as it moves back and forth between realities through some curious sensory connector left just beyond the reader’s awareness. It is a writing that finds a measured space between both worlds as one world, one unifying and captivating experience.”

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.

“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.”—Garrett Phelps on Pixel Flesh in Asymptote

“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.

“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.”—World Literature Today

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:

“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”

“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:

“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.”

Cardboard House Press is a 501c3 nonprofit organization devoted to the creation of spaces and media for cultural, artistic, and literary development through the publication and circulation of writing, art, and contemporary thought from Latin America and Spain and through 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. To date we have published authors from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Spain, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and Uruguay. We are based in Phoenix, Arizona.

Book Art Workshops
Some of our publications are made by hand in community-based workshops. These workshops not only expand the audience for the books we publish, but they also provide a hands-on experience with the work in which individuals participate in production and develop connections to the work. Workshop participants learn to hand sew pages to bind them, marble paint end papers, and create book covers from recycled cardboard. We are proud to be part of the Latin America cartonera movement and to be one of few cartonera projects in the US.

Why Cardboard House Press?
The Cardboard House is the first book by Peruvian writer Martín Adán, published in 1928, and it is considered a precursor to the Latin American literary boom. The work covers part of Adán’s life through a critical and ironic look at his surroundings in Lima at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Cardboard House is a small masterpiece that goes beyond literary genres and renews the narrative aesthetic in the avant-garde era.

Our publishing project takes the name of this book as homage to one of the most important literary figures of the 20th Century, and we employ the title’s meaning of breaking the mold and giving literature a new dimension.

Editors

Charlotte Whittle
Giancarlo Huapaya

Associate Editors
Cristián Gómez Olivares
José Antonio Villarán

Operations
Maggie Messerschmidt

Workshop Coordinator
Ryan Greene

Design
Mutandis
mutandisdesign@gmail.com

Review Coordinators
Ryan Greene
Mary Hope Whitehead Lee
cardboardhousereviews@gmail.com

Marketing, Promotion, and Advertising
Cristian Medina

Distribution
Small Press Distribution

SUPPORTERS
Cardboard House Press appreciates the past and present support of the following organizations:

National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures ︎ Arizona Commission on the Arts ︎ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ︎ Ford Foundation ︎ Southwest Airlines ︎ Surdna Foundation ︎ Arizona Humanities ︎ City of Bloomington Arts Commission ︎ Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry ︎ Marin Community Foundation

Praise for Cardboard House Press

“Cardboard House Press has a reputation for both finely crafted books and exquisite translations from the Spanish, not to mention a team of editors that spans the globe. For an English-only poetry scholar, their editions are essential to an understanding of the Latin and South American landscape.”—Rosemarie Dombrowski, inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ in Angel City Review.

“In their continual effort to bring some of the most interesting Latin American literature to the English-speaking world, Cardboard House Press releases yet another instance of powerful, important poetry with a political resonance.”—Vincent Moreno in “Cadavers by Néstor Perlongher,” Latin American Literature Today.