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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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Bridges
Puentes
Alicia Genovese
Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Coudriet
Bridges is a long poem that wends its way through the structures that cross the Río de La Plata / River between Buenos Aires and its suburbs, creating a spatio-temporal reality in which biographical situations are interwoven with political events. The concrete presence of the bridges, with names such as Pueyrredón, La Noria, Avellaneda, among others, marks the limits of the capital city and the beginning of the periphery surrounding it, characterized by a vastly different landscape. In Genovese's historical memory, many scenes from her childhood and adolescence merge with the revolts and uprising of the Peronist working class and the repressive military dictatorship.
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Poetry & Photography | Chapbook | Bilingual edition
56 pages | ISBN 978-1-945720-40-6 | June 4, 2024
The publication of this book was made possible in part by grants from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the Poetry Foundation.
Praise
Buenos Aires is sometimes said, with a shrug or a wistful sigh, to “turn its back” on its river: as if the city goes about its business without a palpable sense of communion with the water that defines it. Alicia Genovese’s long poem Puentes, tenderly translated by Daniel Coudriet as Bridges, does the very opposite. In one evocative scene after another, Genovese crosses both literal and metaphorical bridges to explore the transformations in a landscape, a family, an era, and a self over time, uttering “nomenclatures / that refuse / the anonymity / of a non-place / and affirm / a unique space / with a skidding / of images passed by, / returned in perception.” Coudriet’s translation of this rich work flows along as whole and complex as the body of a river: gentle, formidable, sonorous, full of surprises.—Robin Myers
Alicia Genovese’s poignant meditation on bridges understands them in all their complexity—sometimes as link, sometimes as obstacle, always as “both precarious and solid.” Holding the sweet and the bitter gracefully suspended on either side, Genovese probes our imperfect impulse to connect and to keep moving, to find solutions that then turn into problems. “A bridge is a leap and an ellipsis,” she tells us. Rarely has this in-between space been so movingly limned.—Donna Stonecipher
Author
Alicia Genovese is a writer born in Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She lives in the city of Buenos Aires and spends long periods in the Delta del Tigre. She has published more than twelve books of poetry, one novel, and three books of essays. She has received several awards and honors, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Literary Prize, and the First Municipal Prize of the Government of Buenos Aires. She is a professor at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), where she teaches poetry courses as part of the Literary Arts Program.
Translator
Daniel Coudriet lives with his wife and son in Richmond, Virginia, and Carcarañá, Argentina. He is the author of Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) and Parade (Blue Hour Press, 2012). His poetry and translations of Argentine poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Circumference, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Mandorla, Massachusetts Review, Washington Square, and elsewhere. His work as a literary translator was previously supported by an NEA fellowship.
Reviews
“It is catastrophe that comes to mind, attacking the concrete structures that are in fact the bridgesthemselves and, metaphorically, breaking the bridges of humanconnection: “Disappeared, sucked in/ a knot opens itself/ with a hid-den file, DNA / … tests, indissolvable affiliation/ in the body’s acid /and the fragmented story/ that hangs in the air”. With the con-tact between individuals cut short, we are left with broken threads.Erosion and detritus. Precarity becomes a theme, showing the riverthat curls through this book as a conduit of death and political violence while on shore, the working-class neighborhoods—once in-habited by the poet herself—invite the writer to search for extractsof language that speak of desire and loss.”—Francine Masiello, Latin American Literary Review
“Alicia Genovese’s new poetry collection, Bridges, translated from the Spanish for the first time, is a fantastic, awe-inducing ramble that utilizes the bridge as a metaphor and a reference point for acute reflection and description. The Buenos Aires-based poet writes through her bridges, the bridges of Argentina, as she explores the personal, the symbolic, and the historical.(...) Genovese’s work is a contemporary commentary on crucial infrastructure that is threatened or taken for granted. As translator Daniel Coudriet briefly mentions in his afterword, the collection contains many references to 20th Century Argentinian political history, offering the reader with other, more ethereal bridges. How our infrastructure can serve as memorial, as haunt, as connector to the wailing torments of brutality, of disappeared people, of crisis.”—Greg Bem, North of Oxford
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