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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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Declaration of Independence
Declaración de Independencia

Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Traducción al español de Hernán Bravo Varela


This documentary poem, constructed exclusively from the United States Declaration of Independence, pits the founding archive against the somatic immediacy of a body politic. Unfolding original syntax to probe the pathology of American masculinity, Ezequiel Zaidenwerg enacts a rigorous exercise of constraint and reconfiguration, spanning the spectral distance from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump. The poem exposes the uncanny resonances of the 18th-century lexicon, where terms like “migrations” and “trade” already vibrate with the systemic violence of the present. By recasting the rejection of the Tyrant into a frantic address to a scornful lover and absent father, this Declaration fashions a counter-epic of lyric urgency. Against the original’s certainty, this remix leaves us with “no self-evident truths in separation / but foreign bodies against each other.”


Poetry | Chapbook | Bilingual edition 
36 pages | ISBN 978-1-945720-44-4
July 4, 2026 | Designed by Mutandis 
Covers letterpress printed with Bidon Community Print & Design Studio
The publication of this book was made possible thanks to the support of the Poetry Foundation


 Praise 

Brilliantly, Ezequiel Zaidenwerg inverts and perverts the Declaration of Independence, somehow making it a truer version of itself.—Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book



 Author 

Ezequiel Zaidenwerg is a Brooklyn-based Argentinian writer, translator, educator and photographer. He holds an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing in Spanish program and a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese, also from NYU. His most recent books are the novel 50 estados: 13 poetas contemporáneos de Estados Unidos, a novelized anthology of fictional contemporary American poetry; and El camino, his versions of the Tao Te King. His doctoral dissertation, El verso desregulado: verso libre y neoliberalismo [Deregulated Verse: Free Verse and Neoliberalism], on the politics of free verse and neoliberal subjectivity, was published in full-length book form in 2025 by Latin American Studies Association Research Commons. His novel Fantasma escritor [Writing Ghost] is scheduled for publication in 2026. He’s an editor and cultural producer for the New York-based Como un lugar collective. He sends daily poetry translations into Spanish through his email newsletter, El poema de hoy.


 Translator 

Hernán Bravo Varela was born in Mexico City in 1979. He has a BA in Literature and Language Sciences from the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, where he has taught in the creative writing program since 2010. Bravo Varela is the author of six poetry collections and three essay collections, including Oficios de ciega pertenencia (1999 and 2004), Hasta aquí (2014), Historia de mi hígado y otros ensayos (2017), La documentación de los procesos(2019), and Malversaciones: Sobre poesía, literatura y otros fraudes (2019). He is also a translator who has published Spanish-language versions of work by Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, and Leonard Michaels, among other authors. Bravo Varela was awarded Mexico’s National Prize for Young Poets in 1999; he also won the 2010 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Literature Contest/Bicentennial Literature in the essay category. He is currently the editor of the Periódico de Poesía at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and a member of Mexico’s National System of Artists (SNCA).