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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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ana c. buena
Valeria Román Marroquín
Translated from the Spanish by Noah MazerIn a searing manifesto-poem of late capitalist debt, hunger, and women’s labor, Valeria Román reconstructs the survival of young migrant and worker ana c. buena amid the so-called Peruvian "economic miracle" and its turbulent political space. Grappling with the meaning of care and exhaustion in an extractive economy, this collection reveals the scale of domestic routine, so easily rendered invisible by historical records, knotted into the macroeconomic scale of geopolitical forces. Hungry, ana inhabits a world that inscribes her as expendable, as experts announce “miracle bonanza times.” With a subsuming rhythm, sensory evocation, and dark humor, Román destabilizes writing itself in the face of a precarious “social totality.”
$20
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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
80 pages | ISBN 9781945720321| September 26, 2024
Designed by Mutandis
The publication of this book was made possible in part by grants from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture and the Poetry Foundation
Author
Valeria Román Marroquín (Arequipa, 1999) has published the books feelback (2016), matrioska (2018), triza la luz (in collaboration with photographer Herbert Mulanovich, 2020), ana c. buena (2021), and MULTITUDES (2023). In 2017, she was awarded the José Watanabe Varas National Poetry Prize. She studied Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and currently works as a translator and interpreter.
Translator
Noah Mazer (New York, 1997) is a poet and translator based in Mexico City. His translations have appeared in Tripwire, Protean, and Paintbucket.page. He published his first full-length translation, Belén Roca’s Infrarealist Magic, with woe eroa in 2022.
Reviews
“Not only does Román Marroquín critique how capitalism encourages spurious individualist desires, including the “fantasy of the individual empire / and the model life,” she also stresses how today’s global structure and its false promises remain grounded in patriarchy, and sustained by artificial gender inequality with deep historical roots.”—Alan Mendoza Sosa, Asymptote
En vez de limitarse a presentar al escrito como un ejemplo más de crítica, la presente edición muestra a ana c. buena con toda la disrupción que su publicación y circulación provoca. Al entrar desde esta radicalidad, abre la oportunidad de conectar a “ana”, la voz poética que lidera los poemas, con las múltiples voces artísticas de resistencia que han germinado en el sur global en años recientes.—Gabriel Antúnez De Mayolo Kou, Latin American Literature Today
Ana, the book’s second-person subject (though the standpoint is at times ambiguous), is placed in relation to sliced onions, beets, and rice, but also in relation to shit, and to the metabolization and digestion of human relationships as well: “the categories withdrawn, / my garbanzos hang back / in the social totality.”Skirting the speaking-for that might easily accompany this poem, Román remains agnostic about the subject’s readiness to push back against oppressive regimes of exploitation and domination within these shifting markers of labor, both waged and reproductive. Time markers (verb tense and conjugation) are skewed, and the subject made subtly multiple.—Judah Rubin in Chicago Review
“Not only does Román Marroquín critique how capitalism encourages spurious individualist desires, including the “fantasy of the individual empire / and the model life,” she also stresses how today’s global structure and its false promises remain grounded in patriarchy, and sustained by artificial gender inequality with deep historical roots.”—Alan Mendoza Sosa, Asymptote
En vez de limitarse a presentar al escrito como un ejemplo más de crítica, la presente edición muestra a ana c. buena con toda la disrupción que su publicación y circulación provoca. Al entrar desde esta radicalidad, abre la oportunidad de conectar a “ana”, la voz poética que lidera los poemas, con las múltiples voces artísticas de resistencia que han germinado en el sur global en años recientes.—Gabriel Antúnez De Mayolo Kou, Latin American Literature Today
Ana, the book’s second-person subject (though the standpoint is at times ambiguous), is placed in relation to sliced onions, beets, and rice, but also in relation to shit, and to the metabolization and digestion of human relationships as well: “the categories withdrawn, / my garbanzos hang back / in the social totality.”Skirting the speaking-for that might easily accompany this poem, Román remains agnostic about the subject’s readiness to push back against oppressive regimes of exploitation and domination within these shifting markers of labor, both waged and reproductive. Time markers (verb tense and conjugation) are skewed, and the subject made subtly multiple.—Judah Rubin in Chicago Review