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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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Commonplace
Lo Común

Hugo García Manríquez

Translated from the Spanish by NAFTA


 Commonplace examines the layers of colonial and geopolitical violence that underlie both contemporary landscapes of Mexico City and the nation’s literary institutions. Literally, the Palacio de Bellas Artes is constructed over chinampas, floating platforms used by the Mexica in agricultural cultivation. In Commonplace, García Manríquez delves into the mutually-constitutive relationship between national culture and the culture of nationalism, asking if other forms of poetic and artistic production are possible given the conditions of ambient violence under which that production must inevitably occur. García Manríquez further links the Mexican state―and the cultural apparatus it supports―to ongoing ecological catastrophe, suggesting that more explicit forms of political force find their basis in the slower violence of environmental exploitation and the systematic erasure of indigenous knowledge across the Global South.



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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
ISBN 978-1-945720-29-1 | October 18, 2022
Cover art by Omar García
Designed by Mutandis  


 Praise 

Commonplace is a literary topos of the natural world, a compilation of the environmental crisis made with an eye so wide that it includes the Popul Vuh, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the budget of SEDENA. This makes it a nature poem that is in no way nostalgic, a political poem that is in no way nationalist, and one of the most moving poems I’ve read in a long time.―Juliana Spahr

Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace brims with lists―of statistics and flowers, of weapons and endangered species. Think Whitman, if Whitman were not concerned with raising up a new nation but with documenting the failure of the nation state and interrogating the role of the poem as witness. Commonplace is a catalog that collapses into a poetics, as well as a catalog of collapse. In stark and brilliant verse, García Manríquez reminds us that “discussions about poetry / …are in the end discussions / about politics.” Commonplace is a poem and a lesson, an indictment and an incitement to action!―Susan Briante

These poems both catalog and interrupt contact between the military and the ecological in everyday contexts: how traces left by the glands of a white-tailed deer and petals from bright yellow creosote also touch Colts and Glocks and ion scanners. In doing so, they ask me to confront whether there remains anything private in my so-called private life. As García Manríquez writes, “When we read literature / we read the budget of the Mexican army.” And in that budget, we may spy the poetics of our own elegies. This compact, but frightening, book invites us to consider “The collapse of abstraction / as another form of freedom.”―Divya Victor

Hugo García Manríquez has crafted here an unsettling anti-art puzzle for the present; a chamber piece sounding life now on the perpetual brink. Commonplace performs, in terse serial transmutations, at once a forensic architecture and a revolt against the narrowing gulf that keeps separate forms of life and a host of unnerving encroachments or enclosures. Lyric and documentary techniques restrain “first something / about our private life” within a nation’s war machines and culture palaces; then, within the overwhelming menaces to species and planet. In our commonplace of aspect and moment, to intonate is to detonate―nowhere to hide from the devastations of modernism; no cold comfort from the “collapse of abstraction / as another form of freedom.” Epitomized in the discerning English-language face-en-face by Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz, Whitney DeVos, and Zane Koss―a.k.a. the North American Free Translation Agreement collective―are responses to what Commonplace poses: Can a disintegrating world enter language only as a means to an exit? Is it possible to strive together in situations already so torn asunder?―Roberto Tejada



 Author 

Born in Mexico in 1978, Hugo García Manríquez is a poet and translator. His most recent full-length collections are Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement (2015), and Lo común (2018). He has translated William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (2009); George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (2019); a collection of essays and poems by Sean Bonney, El lenguaje de las barricadas (2021); After Lorca y otros poemas, an anthology of Jack Spicer’s work (2022), among others. He lives in Oakland, California.


 Translators 

The North American Free Translation Agreement/No America Fraught Translation Argument (NAFTA), ratified in 2019, currently consists of three poets writing from the occupied territories of Canada, Mexico, and the United States: Whitney Celeste DeVos, Zane Koss, and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz. Their translations of Jesús Arellano Meléndrez have appeared in Denver Quarterly, and additional translations of Karen Villeda have appeared in Folder. Selections of this manuscript can be found in tripwire: a journal of poetics.



 Cover Artist 


Omar García (Oaxaca, México, 1991) is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts and Design at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In both 2017 and 2022 he was the recipient of the FONCA grant for young creators. His work has been selected in national and international competitions including the Triennale Grenchen (Switzerland, 2021), the “Shinzaburo Takeda” Biennial (2019), the XII International Graphic Competition for Ex Libris (Poland, 2018) and the III Bienal Internacional de Grabado “Jose Guadalupe Posada” (2017). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and has two individual exhibitions, “Bocetos para un funeral de Estado” (2017) and “Notas para informe” (2016). His work consists of planning projects that are fictitious, impossible, or that will never be realized, with the aim of sabotaging, through the absurd, Art itself.




 Reviews 



Commonplace by Hugo García Manríquez reviewed by Judah Rubin in The Poetry Project:

“Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace approaches the Mexican state as an incomplete allegorical sign. Mexico, as an entity, is inseparable from the sign-system of the militarized world of the war on drugs and the ecocide of late capitalist extractivism.”

“Commonplace is firmly located in this fractured and fracturing totality (“Beside history / our own indexicality”), but, and this is where I find Commonplace to be so brilliant, the text pivots to think with the *Popol Vuh* in its consideration of the more than human world.”

Commonplace by Hugo Garcia Manriquez reviewed by Brent Ameneyro in Los Angeles Review:
“Many poets have said all poetry is political. Hugo García Manríquez takes this idea literally, and to a level unlike any other poetry book I’ve encountered. Manríquez’s Commonplace is an anti-art, anti-subjective, book-length poem that has more weapon specifications and military statistics than poetic utterances.”

“Imagining this book read cover to cover at a poetry reading, I would hear it as part art performance and part political speech. As much as it stands as a work of art, it would equally—if not more so—carry itself as a speech at a political rally.”

Commonplace by Hugo García Manríquez reviewed by Greg Bem in SPREAD:

“Poetry is proxy, a subtext for a radical envisioning of systems of domination from the state. As we read the poet’s lines, we’re told that we are reading the budget of Mexico’s Secretary of Public Security, Secretary of National Defense, Tax Administration Service, and Attorney General. The war machine that is part of the totality is inseparable from poetry; the poet calls forth the absurdity of this inseparation.”


Commonplace by Hugo García Manríquez reviewed by Cindy Juyoung Ok in Poetry Foundation:

“Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace, originally published in Spanish as Lo Común, erases and rearranges an increasingly militarized and nationalized Mexico City. Eight long poems gather fractal impressions of a city, listing military budget statistics, imperiled animal species, and various types of guns imported into Mexico from corporations in the United States and Western Europe.”
“Through repetitions and disintegrations, these recursive poems attempt an original form in which inventory serves as anti-narrative, a willing witness to the collapse of the city’s very architecture.”


Whitney DeVos interviews Hugo García Manríquez in Poetry Magazine: “An Exercise in Autonomy: Hugo García Manríquez on Translation.”


Commonplace by Hugo Garcia Manriquez reviewed by Michael Collins in North of Oxford:

“Hugo Garcia Manríquez begins Commonplace with a unique hybrid of invocation and manifesto, clearly announcing its meta-poetic intentions in the use of both generally conceptual language and semiotic terminology.”