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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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BOAT PEOPLE
Mayra Santos-Febres
Translated by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
Poetry. Paperback
Bilingual edition
ISBN
978-1-945720-19-2
June 15, 2021
The ocean in Boat People is haunted and the book is the heartbreaking journey from sea to horizon. Melancholy and songlike, Santos-Febres documents the nameless, the chum: bodies set adrift by commerce. Like M. NourBese Philips’s Zong!, this phenomenal translation in which I become “a drop of fish sweat,” my body dancing to the poetry’s music but also lamenting the violences that underlie it. —Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Be Recorder and Milk and Filth
Mayra Santos-Febres is one of our most powerful writers, and Boat People has long been a part of the poetic counter-tradition that shaped generations of Puerto Rican poets. Thanks to Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, English-language readers are now plunged into the depths of a text that, to echo Patrick Chamoiseau, is composed of "that strange conference of poets and great beings," lost at sea, tossed on shores, or caught in a world without return address or safe passage. Written like a border drawn on water, this oceanic book is both a source of life and a record of death. It remains as devastatingly urgent as the day it was written.—Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario and while they sleep (under the bed is another country)
Author
Mayra Santos-Febres was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in 1966. She studied Literature at the University of Puerto Rico and received two postgraduate degrees from Cornell University. She is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and a member of the International and Multicultural Institute of the UPR. She has received, among other awards, the Letras de Oro and the Juan Rulfo, both in the short story genre. She is the recipient of a John S. Simon Guggenheim scholarship (2017) and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Residency (2018). Her works have been translated into French, English, German, Croatian, Korean, Icelandic and Italian. She is the author of the poetry books Anamú y manigua (1990), The escaped order (1991), Boat People (2005), Tercer Mundo (2014-20), and Huracanada (2018). She has also published the novels, Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2001), Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (2002), Fe en disfraz, Nuestra Señora de la noche, La amante de Gardel, and the collections of essays, Tratado de Medicina Natural para Hombres Melancólicos and Sobre piel y papel.
Translator
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is a translator and professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York where she teaches U.S. Latinx and Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her translations have appeared in The Nation and sx salon. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press 2014) which will be published in a Spanish edition, Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (University of Illinois Press 2021). She is editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010). She is currently editing a bilingual anthology of Julia de Burgos’s collected writings.
Reviews
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Meaghan Coogan in Asymptote:
“Boat People endeavors to document the undocumented, the invisibilized, and the silenced who are lost to the sea.”
“Santos-Febres’s Boat People documents the Black lives lost in the attempt to chase the mirage of the American Dream, in order to combat the silence and absence of archival records and humanizing discourse surrounding Black death, which is often reduced to numbers in a newspaper article or spectacularized violence in a photograph.”
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Katherine Hedeen in Modern Poetry in Translation:
“Thanks to translator Vanessa Pérez-Rosario and the tireless work of independent publisher of poetry in translation Cardboard House Press, U.S. readers are asked to question how borders are defined; to go beyond the anti-immigrant rhetoric of wall-building; to look east rather than south; to think of the sea.”
Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres reviewed by Shash Trevett in The Times Literary Supplement:
“Brilliantly translated into English for the first time by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, the book-length poem possesses a lyrical intensity enfolding centuries of desperate water crossings. It is a migration elegy and an oceanic hymn that mimics the creative and destructive power of the sea.”
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 inHarvard 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 byZoe Contros Kearl in Kenyon Review:
“Mayra Santos-Febres’s collection Boat People, translated by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, addresses the oft-undiscussed topic of undocumented migration in the Caribbean. In a numbered series of poems that are sparse and beautiful and rending, both in form and in content, Santos-Febres creates devastating narratives time and again.”
Listed in “Favorite Books of Poetry in Translation 2021” by Action Books
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