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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.
︎Newsletter
Gardens
Jardines
Carlos Cociña
Translated from the Spanish by Ian U Lockaby
Design by Mutandis
Poetry
Bilingual edition
Chapbook
36 pages
ISBN 978-1-945720-23-9
November 9, 2021
Nature, culture, and the imagination are hopelessly entangled, to use a key word for Carlos Cociña, in gardens. In his elegant, devastating sequence Gardens, this entanglement is considered, enacted, displayed, mined—but never disentangled; Cociña knows it is far too late for that. I loved whiling in these serpentine lines, where the concrete and abstract flow into and out of each other, “toward stadiums of the private,” suspended between the imagined and the all-too real.—Donna Stonecipher
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Cociña (Concepción, Chile, 1950). His first book is Aguas Servidas (Santiago de Chile, 1980), considered one of the key works of Chilean poetry in the last four decades. In 2014, he received the Municipal Literature Prize in Poetry from the City of Santiago, Chile, for his book El margen de la propia vida, in which “Gardens” was included, and in 2017, he was awarded the Best Works Prize in Poetry by the Circle of Art Critics of Chile for his collection La Casa Devastada. He has also published titles such as Tres canciones (1992), A veces cubierto por las aguas (2003), 71 (setenta y uno) (2004), Plagio del afecto (2009), and Poesía Cero (Anthology, Santiago de Chile, 2017). Since 2003, he has maintained the website www.poesiacero.cl, where he has published some of his work, for which he has been described as one of the pioneers of digital poetry in Chile.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Ian U Lockaby is a poet and translator. His work has been published in The Canary, Anomaly, Denver Quarterly, Cutbank, Posit, and elsewhere. He completed an MFA at Louisiana State University, where he served as Editor in Chief and Translations Editor at New Delta Review. He lives in New Orleans.
REVIEWS
Gardens by Carlos Cociña reviewed by Dennis James Sweeney in Electric Literature:
“This bilingual edition of Carlos Cociña’s poetic sequence is published in a gorgeous, hand-assembled chapbook by Cardboard House Press, a small press committed to publishing Spanish-English bilingual editions. Thoughtfully translated by Ian Lockaby, Gardens/Jardines contains a world in which sharp angles and surreal imagery juxtapose beautifully with idyllic descriptions of nature, never setting one apart from the other. Every sentence combines the sights of water and gardens with the strange confines that birth them, cycling between a fundamentally human description of the world and an inescapably acculturated nature that glows in its tense, generous images of wind and leaves and shrubberies.”
Gardens by Carlos Cociña reviewed by Diego Alegría in Latin American Literature Today:
"...masterfully translated by Ian Lockaby, the Chilean author avails himself of the fragmented connection of nine works of poetic prose, anchored at the syntactic level through parataxis to connect physical and psychological gardens, expansive and minuscule, visual and tonal."
Listed in “Favorite Books of Poetry in Translation 2021” by Action Books
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