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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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each copy is a unique, limited edition

POETECHNICS | Yaxkin Melchy | Tr. by Ryan Greene

"Quick: find your heart. You might dance or you might burn, sprout a seed or grow a circuit. Welcome to the new-wild generation of translational literary poetechnics!"―Sawako Nakayasu

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AND SUDDENLY I WAS JUST DANCING | Tilsa Otta | Tr. by Honora Spicer

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

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SPINNING MILL | Legna Rodríguez Iglesias | Tr. by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

The complexity of Legna Rodríguez's poems lies concealed in their apparent simplicity, woven into the cultural, racial, and political complexity of being Cuban. Ribald and rough, they allow space for the crude materiality of our relations to self, to others, and to that which houses us. In their briefness, these poems are abrupt rather than fast. Eschatology is presented as part of love, but everything can eventually be (part of) something else. Katerina González Seligmann’s translations render these possibilities with faithfulness to their original language. This is not feel-good poetry. That’s why we love Legna.―Cristián Gómez-Olivares

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KOAN UNDERWATER | Juan José Rodinás | Tr. by Ilana Dann Luna

These are poems of highways & flowers, krakens & magnolias, skulls & meteorites. “I am what my body does not allow me to be,” the poet says, or said in Spanish, with a subsequent, parallel song proferred by the translator. These poems translate a country into a series of koans and aquatic musical possibilities, into a house made of pages. These poems are working through the damaged configuration of the world, its fragments and splinters, wondering if justice might still be possible at all.―John Pluecker

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KILIMANJARO | Maricela Guerrero | Tr. by Stalina Villarreal

Maricela Guerrero’s Kilimanjaro obliges its reader to embark on a fraught locomotion, one that is less a journey from point A to point B than a jolting awareness of each of the infinite dots that combine to form any line or trajectory. In a subtle way, Kilimanjaro investigates what it means to be a migrant, a bereaved parent, a lover, or any other person or being yoked to a capitalist machine. Maricela Guerrero is an unflinching, incisive writer, and Stalina Villarreal’s translation rightfully emphasizes the toughness of her vision.―Wendy Burk

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UNEMPLOYED POEMS | Raúl Hernández | Tr. by John Burns

“Even more so than fruit and copper, poetry is miraculously profuse in Chile, which makes us demanding as readers almost without realizing it. Unemployed Poems is already a small classic in this country saturated with brilliance and poetic tradition, and it excels in the execution of one of the most sophisticated and subtle literary tricks of our time: its extreme apparent simplicity.”─Andrea Palet

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ROBERTS POOL TWILIGHTS | Roger Santiváñez | Tr. by Elsa Costa

“The extreme radicalization of his language coincides with the need to give coherence to his project, to the time he ignites with his own fuel. It's not about any paradox; it's enough to read a poem by Santiváñez to understand that his painful coherence is rooted in his permanent and forever unconsumed combustion."─Eduardo Chirinos

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LUNA PARK | Luis Cardoza y Aragón | Tr. by Anthony Seidman

"Luis Cardoza y Aragón knows that his own existence and his capacity to interpret exactly the reason for his current location justifies the celebration of this refulgent promenade through the future. He knows that he can bend poetry in his favor. He can be swift and expose the register of his stroll through Luna Park, capture the scenes, the snapshots which approximate verbal selfies contrasted against distinct backdrops, from his multiple encounters with Luciferian characters who inhabit the boiling of a world in exquisite gestation."—Alan Mills

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