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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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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
320 pages | ISBN 978-1-945720-37-6
August 21, 2025 | Designed by Mutandis
The publication of this book was made possible in part by grants from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) and the Poetry Foundation.

Bodies Found in Various Places

Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes

The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernández
Poemas selectos de Elvira Hernández

Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher


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The first anthology of Elvira Hernández’s poetry translated into English brings the award-winning contemporary Chilean poet's work of love, survival, persistence, disturbance, amazement, and delight to a new audience.

Elvira Hernández has occupied a marginal position in the Chilean poetic scene for decades, her quiet but mordant voice looking inward and outward, ironizing the circumstances of life that have brought us to this critical point in society. As recently as 2018, her work has become more visible after receiving the Jorge Teillier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Prize (Chile 2024). With this belated recognition of her work has come an interest in studying her unique poetic language, with new critical books forthcoming from Spanish and Latin American publishers. Bodies Found in Various Places collects poems written from 1981-2016, providing readers with a curation of texts that show why Hernández is one of the most vital Latin American poets writing today.


—Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
—Shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize
—Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Barrios Book in Translation Prize
—Words Without Borders Best Books in Translation



 Praise 


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



 Author 

Elvira Hernández, pseudonym of María Teresa Adriasola, is a Chilean poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is one of the most important voices of contemporary poetry in the Southern Cone and the Chilean neo-avant-garde. Some of her most important works include: ¡Arre! Halley ¡Arre! (Giddy up, Halley!) (1986), La bandera de Chile (The Chilean Flag) (1991), Santiago Waria (1992), and Pájaros desde mi ventana (Birds from My Window) (2018). She is the recipient of the Jorge Tellier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Award (Chile 2024).

 
 Translators 

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.

Alec Schumacher is Associate Professor at Gonzaga University. His research interests are Latin American poetry, translation, and avant-garde poetics. His publications have been focused on Chilean poets Juan Luis Martínez and Elvira Hernández. His translations include works by Jorge Arbeleche, Elvira Hernández, and Luis Correa-Díaz. In 2019, he published The Chilean Flag, a translation of Elvira Hernández’s book which was nominated for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2020 by The American Literary Translators Association.



 Reviews 


If Hernández translates that silence into her poetry, then in Bodies Found in Various Places, Borzutzky and Schumacher translate it once more. It is a book of silences translated twice over—the silence that conditions all speech, but also the deafening silence imposed on the victims of the regime. As I see it, Bodies Found in Various Places / Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes is an invitation to dwell in this silence in all its forms, across multiple languages, and in the spaces in-between.—Sebastián Andrés Grandas, World Literature Today
“The poem unfurls the flag as both national symbol and shroud, exposing how the apparatus of state violence wraps itself around the body politic. Hernandez’s writing is incandescent with resistance, transforming metaphor into protest, lament and survival.”—Leo Boix, The Morning Star

“The poems in this career-spanning anthology are, most of all, politically engaged and often visceral. They’re also formally inventive and span the sacred and the profane, sometimes in the same work.”—Tobias Carrol, Words Without Borders

“Hernández’s omnipresent personal narrative (which is not literally on the page, but can be felt) is best experienced in the opening poem/book The Chilean Flag. This book-length poem was circulated illegally, in opposition to the dictatorship, as photocopies passed hand to hand starting in 1981 until its official publication in 1991.”—Brent Ameneyro, Letras Latinas

“The six works gathered in this anthology trace a compelling arc through four decades of poetry that show Elvira Hernández’s singular commitment to chronicling oppression from the marginalized perspective that defines her “ethics of invisibility.” Readers who enter this volume are introduced to the full range of a poet whose work, written between 1981 and 2018, is finally receiving recognition in her home country. This Cardboard House Press edition serves as an accessible introduction and, at the same time, a definitive bilingual reference.”—Vicent Moreno, ReVista, The Harvard Review of Latin America

“The brilliance of Hernández’s poetic witness is in part her ability to find the downturned facet of a story and document it…The dichotomy of the reportage—at once a brilliant inspiring image of identity and an incessant detachment—is nothing short of shocking as it lays bare the contradictions inherent in a society under dictatorship rule.”—Jacqueline Balderrama, Full Stop

“Praised by Cecilia Vicuña as a poetry that “restores the right of words to speak,” Bodies Found in Various Places is a truly captivating anthology of Chilean neo-avant-gardist Elvira Hernández’s collected works.”—Paul Cunningham, Heavy Feather Review



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