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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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And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing
Y de pronto solo bailaba

Tilsa Otta

Translated from the Spanish by Honora Spicer


And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing collects poetry by Tilsa Otta (Lima, 1982) in a chapbook of gender-defiant, carnal movement. The rhythm of perreo carries us into an anticolonial space of sensual and sexual liberation which pushes against binaries and towards multiplicity. Curating a collective of spiritual proportions, Otta’s 'New Heaven' is boisterous and honest, zany and earnest, queer and color filled.



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Poetry | Book Art | Bilingual edition
56 pages | February 15, 2023 | ISBN 978-1-945720-27-7
Designed by Mutandis
Covers letterpress printed with Shut Eye Press
Part of the Cartonera Collective Series, these books include a letterpress cover and are made by hand in community workshops, using sewn binding with recycled cardboard.


 Praise 

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



Tilsa Otta has quickly, and with good reason, become recognized as one of the leading voices of new Latin American writing. From novels to poems, her work is always charged with a tender, cosmic, and electrically personal take on life. I would say that Tilsa is a shooting star, for the energy of her ascent in Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, and Spain, but there’s nothing fleeting about the light she emits. Tilsa’s star is here to stay, shining at last over the English-speaking world in Honora Spicer’s translation. So, look up, take it in, and don't forget to make a wish: her poems have been known to make even the wildest ones come true.

―Kit Schluter




 Author 

Tilsa Otta Vildoso (Lima, 1982) is an audiovisual artist and writer. She has published four books of poetry, a book of short stories, a children’s poetry book, and a comic. Her most recent publication is the novel “Lxs niñxs de oro de la alquimia sexual” (Penguin Random House). She creates experimental and fictional films and leads poetry workshops for adults and children. For more information and ‘magia blanca’: www.tilsaotta.com
 

 Translator 

Honora Spicer (Cambridge, MA, 1992) is a writer and experiential educator. Her documentary poetry and literary translations from Spanish have appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, Tripwire, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, World Literature Today, Action Books, and elsewhere. www.honoraspicer.com



 Reviews 


And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing by Tilsa Otta reviewed by Natalia Chávez Gomes da Silva in Latin American Literature Today:
“I would recommend Otta’s poems to those who accept there is stability in instability, to those who find peace in contradiction: to those who often find themselves floating in the figurative vacuum of the duty-beings and the power-beings that the rules of this world switch up with frantic speed. To those who choose to launch themselves into imagined orbits, clinging to nothing but movement, acceleration, or a fleeting sensation in some pore of the skin or in some depth beneath the sternum. This book is for those who understand the beauty of disorder.”

“The translation by Honora Spicer, as she explains herself in the translator’s note, comprehends the bodily flow of Otta’s poetry, a flow that does not mean softness or silkiness, as the word might suggest. Spicer understands that, in order to transport the Peruvian author’s movement to a new code—to English—she has to couple up, like you would in a dance, and that doesn’t mean mirroring her moves, but rather following her double rhythm: that of Otta’s poetic subject and that of the world in which this subject moves.”




An Invitation by Captivation: A review of Tilsa Otta’s And Suddenly I Was Just Dancingby 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.”




And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing reviewed by Diego Baez in Letras Latinas:

“[...] themes of collectivity, reciprocity, and solidarity are central to this sampling of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta’s ecstatic, celebratory, communitarian poetics (...) There is real pleasure, not only in the lyrical content, but also in bouncing between scripts, in reading between languages to embrace the reverberation. As Honora Spicer says in the Translator's Note, Otta’s lyrics enact a “carnal movement in Spanish,” and translating into English meant “not mimicking but moving sensuously in response.”




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