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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
Mark

CARTONERA COLLECTIVE


Cartonera Collective es un equipo de creadores dedicados a la elaboración de libros arte bilingües de autores latinoamericanos. 


Cartonera Collective is a team of creators dedicated to making bilingual artist books by Latin American authors. 




Cartonera Collective workshops not only expand the audience for the books we publish, but they also provide a hands-on experience in which community members participate in production, develop connections to the poetry, and widen their horizons of poetry and culture. Workshop participants learn techniques to hand sew and bind pages, marble endpapers, linocut print, and create book covers from recycled cardboard. 


    

Providence, des/centro de poesía. 2023-Present




Phoenix, Palabras Bilingüal Bookstore. 2018-2025



Santa Cruz, The Writing Center in Kresge College at the University of California Santa Cruz. 2018-2019



New York, Ugly Duckling Presse, The Old American Can Factory, 2018-2019.

 

Praise for Cartonera Collective


“You cannot translate from a position of monolinguist superiority” (324), wrote translator and theorist Gayatri Spivak in 1992. What CHP does to subvert monolinguist superiority by sharing international literature in bilingual editions is the same as what these cardboard books do to subvert “monolinguist superiority” more metaphorically—to subvert established publishing methods, to put book-making in the hands of the many and not the few, to discover the additional artistic possibilities that come when using recycled and handmade materials. While they are all in keeping with the press’ commitment to a few core tenets (as I understand them from reading other CHP books)—like multilingualism, feminism, holding power to account, and social, environmental, and racial justice—it’s also incredible how varied these three cardboard texts are. Each book visually demonstrates the publishers’ commitment to form following function, and they find their perfect fit in cardboard iterations.”


—Kelsi Vanada, “Cardboard Conscious: Translation in Community,” Reading in Translation 



"All of these books focus on redefinition in some form, making them enchanting translated work, as that redefinition has had to take shape  in two different languages. The books themselves are beautiful, handmade pieces, that fit the project of the poetry. Kilimanjaro folds out into an accordion, creating the largest track illustrated in the book. Spinning Mill and Koan Underwater shift the orientation of the words on the page, shifting the  orientation of the reader to the words, to poetry, to translation, all at once. The Cartonera Collective’s project makes not just the literature but the publication process itself a multicultural translation.”

—Clara Altfield reviewing Kilimanjaro, Spinning Mill and Koan Underwater in Kenyon Review, selected by Katherine M. Hedeen



“The first thing you’ll notice when picking up And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing—which you should, grasp the physical object with your body—is the book’s surprising width, for a chapbook of poems, and its roughness to the touch: the covers are cardboard, the endpapers and interior pages bundled together and all glued together, the entire construction visible through the book’s naked spine. This unique method of assembly employed by Cardboard House Press is the result of their Cartonera Collective, which conducts workshops for community members in Phoenix, Arizona and Providence, Rhode Island to learn “to hand sew and bind pages, marble endpapers, linocut print, and create book covers from recycled cardboard.” The end product combines aesthetic, pedagogical, and cooperative efforts with a concern for sustainability in using recycled materials to create literary objects of art (...) There’s no question that endeavors like the Cartonera Collective at Cardboard House Press contribute exciting new entries to the ongoing legacy of Latin American poetry in English translation.”


—Diego Baez reviewing And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing in Letras Latinas



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