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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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Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress
Diario de una costurera proletaria
Victoria Guerrero-Peirano
Translated from the Spanish by Anastatia Spicer and Honora Spicer
This book of threads binds the autobiographical and the bureaucratic, the maternal body and the factory floor. In fierce and tender lines, contemporary Peruvian poet Victoria Guerrero-Peirano pierces intergenerational silences with erupting screams. Three scenes probe the precarity of textile lineages tensioned against patriarchal violence and neoliberal industrial orders. “I leave words,” a daughter speaks in the face of her mother’s tactile engrossment, tangling with doubt what it means to “know enough” by a life of letters. Of immigrant seamstresses killed in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in United States history, the poet asks: “can poetry speak?” And a state’s forced sterilizations inhibit women from practicing traditional weaving by kallwa, shaping a verse of testimony. In the face of multiple unfolding violences and ruptures in practices of world-making, the Diary declares, “We seamstresses are timeless.”
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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
48 pages | ISBN 978-1-945720-36-9 | May 2, 2025
Designed by Mutandis | Co-published with Tripwire
Covers letterpress printed with Bidon Community Print & Design Studio
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
Praise
In this beautifully woven translation, Victoria Guerrero’s Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress is a vindication of our mothers and grandmothers, who toiled in the dark, sewing and knitting, and of all the women in factories trying to satisfy our hunger for fast fashion. With each line, Guerrero rips through the seams of sexist and classist distinctions that elevate fine art above handicraft, professors above factory workers, and writers above seamstresses. From the luminous frayed threads emerge the shared silences and rage of these women, which, woven together, form a sturdy but fluid textile that invites us to consider and acknowledge the price of their invisible labor.—Rosa Alcalá, author of YOU
One of the most destabilizing poets of contemporary Peruvian literature, provoking us and demanding that we reconsider our notions of body, language, and nation.—Sara Uribe, author of Antígona González
Author
Victoria Guerrero-Peirano (Lima, Peru) is a poet, researcher and essayist. In 2020, she was awarded the National Literature Award in Peru with the transdisciplinary essay Y la muerte no tendrá dominio and in 2023 she won the Proart prize for her book La mujer. She has published ten books of poetry, among them Todas las poetas peruanas tienen cáncer (2024), I am no body (2021), Diario de una costurera proletaria (2019), Zurita + Guerrero (a duo with the poet Raúl Zurita, 2014) and Berlín (2011). She has also published the novella Un golpe de dados (novelita sentimental pequeño burguesa) (2014). Guerrero-Peirano holds a doctorate in Literature and a masters in Gender Studies. She forms part of Proyecto Trans.arch: archivos en transición (Project Trans.arch: archives in transition), she is a researcher with the independent project Mapa de Escritoras Peruanas (Map of Peruvian Women Writers), she is a founder of the activist group Comando Plath and she directs the editorial Intermezzo Tropical. She cares for Varela and Berlin and teaches at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.
Translators
Anastatia Spicer is a weaver. www.anastatia.work.
Honora Spicer is a writer and experiential educator. Her documentary poetry, essays and literary translations from Spanish have appeared in The Boston Review, Jacket2, Tripwire, Asymptote, and elsewhere. www.honoraspicer.com.
Reviews
A wonderful collection by the Peruvian poet, researcher, and essayist Victoria Guerrero-Peirano, with echoes of Anne Boyer’s 2015 work Garments Against Women…it is an incredible, thoughtful work that interweaves (ah!) meditations on work, women’s historical ties to fabric-making and weaving, concepts of translation, and more into a cohesive, fascinating whole.—Rhian Sassen, Phrase Books
"It’s a bright constellation, this book: so many connections illuminated in its pages, its design, its languages, its making!…I am grateful for Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress because it is a living artifact that testifies to our ties to one another. Late capitalism would have us throw up our hands. This is not what Guerrero-Peirano has done. She calls us to take up thread."—Jill Magi, Jacket2
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