https://cardboardhousepress.org cardboardhousepress.org Thu, 30 Sep 2021 23:52:52 +0000 https://cardboardhousepress.org en https://cardboardhousepress.org/Home-Image-Scroll Thu, 30 Sep 2021 23:52:52 +0000 cardboardhousepress.org https://cardboardhousepress.org/Home-Image-Scroll poetry + community + translation&nbsp;A Little Pretty Personality | Berta García Faet | Tr. Kelsi Vanada&nbsp;<img width="4969" height="2863" width_o="4969" height_o="2863" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/49c70a54b2b78cec5ff60056bb03463abcda77a3e4b272e610f78358a7a8d648/A-Little-Pretty-Personality_WEB.jpg" data-mid="250930902" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/49c70a54b2b78cec5ff60056bb03463abcda77a3e4b272e610f78358a7a8d648/A-Little-Pretty-Personality_WEB.jpg" />“Poof”—!—and welcome, reader—to the peculiar magic of Berta García Faet's A Little Pretty Personality, overflowing with playful, subversive feminist wonder. It will grab you by the hand and have you swimming through intellectual and sensual realms alike, with dazzling aplomb, artful moxie, and a witty, flickering tongue. In translation by Kelsi Vanada, you can trust that the translator is in on it. There are faux-neo-archaic overtones: not timeless, but all over time. The uniqueness of this flavor of strident resistance is like no other, the book acting as testament to what it feels like to forge one’s very own relationship to language. To boot: “I’m going to die and that’s magical.”—Sawako Nakayasu, author of Pink Waves &nbsp;Declaration of Independence | Ezequiel Zaidenwerg | Tr. Hernán Bravo Varela&nbsp; <img width="4969" height="2863" width_o="4969" height_o="2863" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6fe15af672b262166a61c7ae13cf6238e059b30916552c506172ec516357d795/-Declaration-of-Independence_Ezequiel-Zaidenwerg_WEB.jpg" data-mid="250218154" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6fe15af672b262166a61c7ae13cf6238e059b30916552c506172ec516357d795/-Declaration-of-Independence_Ezequiel-Zaidenwerg_WEB.jpg" /> 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 ---&nbsp; &nbsp; --- 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.” &nbsp;JAWS | Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza | Tr. Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier&nbsp;<img width="4969" height="2863" width_o="4969" height_o="2863" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/55804df75e491741e17470b81e8e50bbdc39a853232acfa2f3427a42517ab694/JAWS_Xitlalitl-Rodriguez-Mendoza_WEB.jpg" data-mid="250229053" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/55804df75e491741e17470b81e8e50bbdc39a853232acfa2f3427a42517ab694/JAWS_Xitlalitl-Rodriguez-Mendoza_WEB.jpg" /> Fusing lyric with documentary material, playful with scenes of ominous oceanic gloom, Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza has constructed a kind of poetic aquarium that rewrites Hollywood horror within the deep currents of international commerce. Aswim in night terrors and dark foreboding, JAWS circles its prey, quietly sneaking up on readers entranced by the rocking waves of its verse, creatively co-translated by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier. If “to tooth means to cling to the world,” then JAWS takes a big bite out of reality, jumping off the screen and out of its pen, leaving this uncanny literary account in its wake.—David Buuck, author of&nbsp;SITE CITE CITY &nbsp;ANTUCO | Carlos Soto Román &amp; Carlos Cardani Parra | Tr. Judah Rubin&nbsp;<img width="2533" height="1537" width_o="2533" height_o="1537" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/33f0e61e825d36ab857e7d941c1df00d0f239e6b16baaf9817ae5da6e361ac8c/Antuco9.jpeg.jpg" data-mid="248571020" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/33f0e61e825d36ab857e7d941c1df00d0f239e6b16baaf9817ae5da6e361ac8c/Antuco9.jpeg.jpg" /> Chilean military training, “whiteout conditions,” masculinity, windchill factors… Antuco epitomizes an ideal union of political critique and poetic craft. This incessant and inescapable narrative builds with the fury of the storm itself that took the lives of 44 conscripts atop a frigid stratovolcano. Cardani Parra and Soto Román have erected a new monument of words that unrelentingly condemns the necropolitics of military command and control.—Mark Nowak, author of Social Poetics Carlos Cardani Parra and Carlos Soto Román tell this story through what was left behind—military manuals, maps, weather indices, news headlines, survivors' testimony—and through these documents chart how nationalism is often made out of the bodies the nation state fails to protect.—Juliana Spahr, author of Ars PoeticasLyric and typographic experimentation (as well as a deft translation by Judah Rubin) contribute to an unforgettable and haunting testimonial. “Do not stop. Do not pause./ Do not help. Eyes straight,” the conscripts are told. In this extraordinary book, their plight resounds eerily into our present as we hurl blindly towards a litany of equality preventable disasters.—Susan Briante, author of 13 Questions for the Next Economy &nbsp;Red Seed: Poems for Luno | Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez | Tr. Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos&nbsp;<img width="5694" height="3712" width_o="5694" height_o="3712" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2ba3981c47b02e297f4b7a247c940dfb63118f263d6bb43015cbdbf3f8a48c3e/RED-SEED_Cover_WEB.jpg" data-mid="244397096" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2ba3981c47b02e297f4b7a247c940dfb63118f263d6bb43015cbdbf3f8a48c3e/RED-SEED_Cover_WEB.jpg" />Through a voice at once intimate and collective, Lucas Juárez expands the powerful presence of Tutunakú roots to open up territories and to interweave desirous bodies, dream relationships, and the memories of women ancestors. This beautiful translation by Wendy Call and Whitney DeVos, in a precious handmade edition, affirms the trilingual (Tutunakú, Spanish and English) as an ethical strategy of listening to and translating the world. Red Seed collects twelve poems of women's sexualities and spirits in which body, language and territory are political spaces that Indigenous memory expands within and renews.—Maricela Guerrero, author of The Dream of Every Cell &nbsp;Anthem of Evaporated Tears | Xavier Valcárcel de Jesús | Tr. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera&nbsp;<img width="1589" height="1008" width_o="1589" height_o="1008" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa4c4ef1dd50fd7ce98987f4235106c233b59fdcf81af17ffc53e571dae115d1/Anthem-of-Evaporated-Tears-by-Xavier-Valcarcel2-web.jpg" data-mid="240347821" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aa4c4ef1dd50fd7ce98987f4235106c233b59fdcf81af17ffc53e571dae115d1/Anthem-of-Evaporated-Tears-by-Xavier-Valcarcel2-web.jpg" /> Xavier Valcárcel’s El deber del pan struck me with full force upon publication—“changed” feels far too slight. Like many, I came to read it as a testament to a life lived and a life still living and set ablaze by our own conflagrations. In the conspiracy of translation, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera kneads Valcárcel’s violence and tenderness, its intimacy and flight, extending the book’s position as an indelible landmark in our literature. It sings with generous compassion, in English as it does in Spanish—not only with fealty, but with profound care. Here is the work of our hands, which nourishes us and must continue to feed. This book is sustenance and provocation, opening our eyes to the tender, brutal realities we carry within us, and through which we are made.—Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, author of The Life Assignment &nbsp;Bodies Found in Various Places | Elvira Hernández | Tr. Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher&nbsp;<img width="3527" height="1989" width_o="3527" height_o="1989" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e456a1fbe734bfebff66bfd0a215a02245eff773eaee9a4ee1c7b7176ad84d5e/Elvira-Hernandez4WEB2.jpg" data-mid="236416088" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e456a1fbe734bfebff66bfd0a215a02245eff773eaee9a4ee1c7b7176ad84d5e/Elvira-Hernandez4WEB2.jpg" /> Elvira Hernández wrote her poem “The Chilean Flag” after she herself had been detained and tortured by the dictatorship for not complying with its lies. While Chileans were trained to look the other way, to go quiet by this terror, Elvira Hernández wrote a poem that could not be printed. Yet, the poem escaped like a prisoner and began circulating in Xeroxes, from hand to hand, until ten years later it was finally printed in Buenos Aires. In Elvira Hernández’s poetry, each line restores the right of words to speak. Each word becomes a healer, a prayer for a wounded, enslaved humanity forced to obey the rule of profit over life.—Cecilia Vicuña, author of Spit Temple &nbsp;Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress | Victoria Guerrero-Peirano | Tr. Anastatia Spicer and Honora Spicer&nbsp;<img width="2231" height="1412" width_o="2231" height_o="1412" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b23b33a5c46dfb2c1dc598480b197fbacc2bb840f6d315729e05414a0f0c2fb5/Diary-of-a-Proletarian-Seamstress-WEB1.jpg" data-mid="234073605" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b23b33a5c46dfb2c1dc598480b197fbacc2bb840f6d315729e05414a0f0c2fb5/Diary-of-a-Proletarian-Seamstress-WEB1.jpg" /> 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 &nbsp;The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems | César Moro | Tr. Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe&nbsp;<img width="6512" height="4100" width_o="6512" height_o="4100" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54684688e26fa4c11c270f751af5a7a1766e062af9b458d11e06b43e45e3837d/Cesar-Moro-WEB.jpg" data-mid="228122682" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54684688e26fa4c11c270f751af5a7a1766e062af9b458d11e06b43e45e3837d/Cesar-Moro-WEB.jpg" /> César Moro’s The Equestrian Turtle joins Alice Rahon’s Shapeshifter and Joyce Mansour’s Emerald Wounds in making available in English important work written under Breton’s influence but excluded from Surrealism’s official history. In this document of romantic devotion and erotic obsession, Moro offers his own “delirious, sublime interpretation of reality,” a sensorium as open to “The total loss of speech of breath” as to “The fine, secluded odor of your armpits.” Bary’s and Quispe’s marvelous translations honor the “shattered economy” of the love affair while also admitting us into the felt presence of Moro’s beloved with his “fabulous, smoky mane.” Lit by love’s “incendiary body,” these queer poems burn with hallucinatory and rhapsodic immediacy.—Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man &nbsp;String Theory | Karen Villeda | Tr. NAFTA&nbsp;<img width="6512" height="4500" width_o="6512" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fd38b63e43d3684c7f7e28ed47ebb3b2c9214ebcbd1ddc632df692473f2f36db/String-Theory-by-Karen-Villeda-WEB.jpg" data-mid="225482947" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fd38b63e43d3684c7f7e28ed47ebb3b2c9214ebcbd1ddc632df692473f2f36db/String-Theory-by-Karen-Villeda-WEB.jpg" /> String Theory gripped me from start to finish: I surfaced, gasping. In this book-length poem in fragments, Villeda invents an investigative poetics. It is not an attempt at resurrection, no, but a lyric diary that spins around an absence, a mystery, a haunting, an attempt “to reap my unname in the bone marrow,” even as it remains impossible to discern whether the author’s namesake took her own life or lost it to violence within a context of femicides. String Theory possesses the candor, captivating musicality, and willingness to gaze into the darkness of Alejandra Pizarnik, Isabel Zapata, Sara Uribe, Diana del Angel, Dolores Dorantes. Much praise to NAFTA for conjuring an astonishing version of this book in English, with propulsive syntax and searing diction that manages, magically, to resonate with the melody of the Spanish.—Rachel Galvin, author of Uterotopia &nbsp;The Eielson Bundle: Special Editions for Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Centennial&nbsp;<img width="2443" height="2214" width_o="2443" height_o="2214" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bb561870ba91858c987a83be3e034c188bf6caae70d81d9670a342a2a56af3cf/EielsonG.jpg" data-mid="221922546" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bb561870ba91858c987a83be3e034c188bf6caae70d81d9670a342a2a56af3cf/EielsonG.jpg" /> Only 100 bundles available! Celebrate with us the centennial anniversary of queer poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson, one of the 20th century’s most important artists. The Eielson Bundle includes Dark Night of the Body, an art chapbook sewn and printed by hand in Cardboard House Press workshops; a limited-edition bilingual tote bag with Eielson’s visual poem Poetry in a Bird’s Form; and a bilingual art postcard of Poetry in E Major, all brilliantly translated for the first time by Shook.---&nbsp; &nbsp; --- “An influential midcentury Peruvian poet who exiled himself to Europe after publishing the initial works that made him a legend in his home country (...) one of Latin America’s most important wordsmiths.”—World Literature Today&nbsp;Dark Night of the Body | Jorge Eduardo Eielson | Tr. Shook&nbsp;<img width="3252" height="1967" width_o="3252" height_o="1967" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b9daf11cad997fe0230366a8d6454ef289ec8df7dec0c17511b1c710c7a10009/Eielson-baja1.jpg" data-mid="219136193" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b9daf11cad997fe0230366a8d6454ef289ec8df7dec0c17511b1c710c7a10009/Eielson-baja1.jpg" /> Dark Night of the Body showcases Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s poetic abilities at the peak of his powers. Hidden for years in the silence of a drawer, these poems were written in Rome in 1955 but only published in their definitive form in 1989. Querying the poet’s deepest identities, this collection reflects on the precariousness of the body by dismantling its materiality. Eielson guides us simultaneously through pleasure, pain, and play, as he redefines the limits of his biological condition, gender, and political/poetical pronouncements. Brilliantly translated by Shook, this bilingual edition of Dark Night of the Body proves essential to understanding the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists. &nbsp;ana c. buena | Valeria Román Marroquín | Tr. Noah Mazer&nbsp;<img width="1647" height="1000" width_o="1647" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1dcc0a570c782ccc5ed9890c3ab1cfda50496d372a21f56dc3511c8555c29ba4/ana-c-buena-1b-mas-blancoweb.jpg" data-mid="218691213" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1dcc0a570c782ccc5ed9890c3ab1cfda50496d372a21f56dc3511c8555c29ba4/ana-c-buena-1b-mas-blancoweb.jpg" /> In 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.” &nbsp;BRIDGES | Alicia Genovese | Tr. Daniel Coudriet&nbsp;<img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2e722d4e2c5a352e13563b80995565058eb86e34f9d450fd75b3cdb12a92e922/Bridges12.jpg" data-mid="212326668" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2e722d4e2c5a352e13563b80995565058eb86e34f9d450fd75b3cdb12a92e922/Bridges12.jpg" /> In one evocative scene after another, Genovese crosses both literal and metaphorical bridges to explore the transformations in a landscape, a family, an era, and a self over time, uttering “nomenclatures / that refuse / the anonymity / of a non-place / and affirm / a unique space / with a skidding / of images passed by, / returned in perception.” Coudriet’s translation of this rich work flows along as whole and complex as the body of a river: gentle, formidable, sonorous, full of surprises.—Robin Myers &nbsp;MUSIC NOTEBOOK | Mariela Dreyfus | Tr. by&nbsp;Gabriel Amor&nbsp;<img width="5069" height="2986" width_o="5069" height_o="2986" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c64c717d2e1d07dc3b77c6491a5b908c0019dccb30abd7e0d8d37906631833b/Cuaderno-Musico2baja.jpg" data-mid="212329666" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6c64c717d2e1d07dc3b77c6491a5b908c0019dccb30abd7e0d8d37906631833b/Cuaderno-Musico2baja.jpg" /> In writing as tough as it is visionary, Mariela Dreyfus scores the “landscape / both real and dreamed” and summons a haunting lyric choreography, in conversation with everyone from César Vallejo and Carlos Oquendo de Amat to Mallarmé, Pina Bausch, and the Afro-Peruvian drum. This notebook contains notes from many undergrounds (Lima, New York, the self), developing processually into an expansive poetics of pain, thirst, flight, the mother’s womb, the girl’s rebellion, the lover’s body, the burning city. Translator Gabriel Amor honors the pulsing rhythms of the poet’s aural daydream without sacrificing the elegance of her knotty syntax, its “prenatal impulse” in search of “the memory of a harmony that / predates us.” Music Notebook is a major work by an essential poet of our Latin American New York.—Urayoán Noel &nbsp;POETECHNICS | Yaxkin Melchy | Tr. by Ryan Greene&nbsp;<img width="1300" height="805" width_o="1300" height_o="805" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f2676e54c8b29a6916c8723aeb7723aac8510e34e768e8165a0153540a1ec57/Yaxkin-Melchy9.jpg" data-mid="174590417" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3f2676e54c8b29a6916c8723aeb7723aac8510e34e768e8165a0153540a1ec57/Yaxkin-Melchy9.jpg" />Yaxkin Melchy's Poetechnics is an invitational poetic provocation that both transforms and transcends the traditional categorization(s) of poetry and science. Drawn from the first two full-length books in his decade-in-the-making project, THE NEW WORLD, the sci-tech poems in Poetechnics celebrate Melchy's lyrically rich and formally inventive approach to disciplinary blurring. This wonderstruck collection, dancing from the depths of the ocean to the furthest reaches of outer space, traverses circuit diagrams, binary sequences, textbook figures, and more. Here, in these thrumming bilingual pages (and their accompanying digital "transfluxions"), we witness Melchy in action, kinetic and expansive, as he invites us to dream alongside him toward "a scientific imaginary rooted in the heart.” ---&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;---"Quick: find your heart. You might dance or you might burn, sprout a seed or grow a circuit. Welcome to the new-wild generation of translational literary poetechnics!"―Sawako Nakayasu &nbsp;AND SUDDENLY I WAS JUST DANCING | Y DE PRONTO SOLO BAILABA | Tilsa Otta | Tr. by Honora Spicer&nbsp; <img width="1200" height="825" width_o="1200" height_o="825" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2e7eb68db92c260d57136b7c1a6394660d03ebdd95ab4bb27991fd833ec8ee8c/And-Suddenly-I-Was-Just-Dancing-Tilsa-Otta-web1.jpg" data-mid="161521341" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2e7eb68db92c260d57136b7c1a6394660d03ebdd95ab4bb27991fd833ec8ee8c/And-Suddenly-I-Was-Just-Dancing-Tilsa-Otta-web1.jpg" /> Tilsa Otta is one of my favorite poets, and Honora Spicer’s translations capture what is luminous about Otta’s work. This collection is nocturnal punk graffiti. She manages to make a voice that’s a little IDGAF, a little mystical into a hypnotic pulse radiating out like a bat signal in the shape of her girlfriend’s puppy. And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing is the balm for your mercury in retrograde. Bring your satellite.―Carmen Giménez Smith x+x+x+, which is to say, the “x” that in Spanish marks out the gender binary can wheel, in Honora Spicer’s translations as much as in Tilsa Otta’s poems, into the “+” of possibility, the unapologetic celebration of appetite, savoring the spit we share in articulating the more that is already here. These are poems that call us into the “wild lyceum” where our gorgeous animality tunes its collective attention to the elegance of its own music. Otta and Spicer lead us in a “dance / supposedly obscene / that assures / Humanity’s continuance,” which is to say x+x+x+―Farid Matuk &nbsp;COMMONPLACE | LO COMÚN | Hugo García Manríquez | Tr. by NAFTA&nbsp; <img width="800" height="593" width_o="800" height_o="593" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4cf50173bf3532a633e345f70cce612a0c79d5f37db3da7b988cb11571214e1a/Commonplace-4-web.jpg" data-mid="155170644" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" data-draggable src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/4cf50173bf3532a633e345f70cce612a0c79d5f37db3da7b988cb11571214e1a/Commonplace-4-web.jpg" /> Commonplace is a literary topos of the natural world, a compilation of the environmental crisis made with an eye so wide that it includes the Popul Vuh, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the budget of SEDENA. This makes it a nature poem that is in no way nostalgic, a political poem that is in no way nationalist, and one of the most moving poems I’ve read in a long time.―Juliana Spahr These poems both catalog and interrupt contact between the military and the ecological in everyday contexts: how traces left by the glands of a white-tailed deer and petals from bright yellow creosote also touch Colts and Glocks and ion scanners. In doing so, they ask me to confront whether there remains anything private in my so-called private life. As García Manríquez writes, “When we read literature / we read the budget of the Mexican army.” And in that budget, we may spy the poetics of our own elegies. This compact, but frightening, book invites us to consider “The collapse of abstraction / as another form of freedom.”―Divya Victor &nbsp;FUDEKARA | Liliana Ponce | Tr. by Michael Martin Shea&nbsp; <img width="1000" height="704" width_o="1000" height_o="704" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f4e084758fe45f764e7dee14c080c13661a8cf1283ea1d047423d28d73e6d1e/FUDEKARA001transparente.png" data-mid="212402049" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5f4e084758fe45f764e7dee14c080c13661a8cf1283ea1d047423d28d73e6d1e/FUDEKARA001transparente.png" /> The work's evanescence, its ‘not being,' the composition of the void, of the space between the lines, is the art, the mastery of Liliana Ponce in Fudekara, to make present what is felt, the other reality within ‘reality,’ released by and through the brush. Her admirable reticence is a bolt of world-opening lightning.—Cecilia VicuñaIn Liliana Ponce's dekatesseral Fudekara, nimbly translated by Michael Martin Shea, all thought emits a cosmic gesture and the writing hand traces an inviting, inkwet path to the negative sublime.—Joyelle McSweeney &nbsp;THE DREAM OF EVERY CELL | EL SUEÑO DE TODA CÉLULA | Maricela Guerrero | Tr. by Robin Myers&nbsp; <img width="1000" height="750" width_o="1000" height_o="750" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4530f29864ae0ee15926b5852fa2a9a1d785a5f6f2bcef6c00371e1d214ff1c8/the-dream-8web.jpg" data-mid="155106879" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4530f29864ae0ee15926b5852fa2a9a1d785a5f6f2bcef6c00371e1d214ff1c8/the-dream-8web.jpg" /> Maricela Guerrero leads us right back into the classrooms where many of us first encountered the scientific language that opened us to (and distanced us from) the plant kingdom. And she leads us out again, forcing us to confront the territories of devastation before she introduces us, suddenly small, into the cells, the sap in the trees, the shapes of the leaves. Everything pulses and everything shines there: language, connections among the elements, protest. What wise, warm writing by Maricela Guerrero, and what a marvelous English translation by Robin Myers, a poet herself. An essential voice in the eco-poetry being written within the Spanish language today.—Cristina Rivera Garza Guerrero metabolizes the language of science with the languages of the environment to teach us lessons in attentiveness, care, and healing. Moreover, she protests ongoing extraction and calls us to protect the “lungs of the earth.” Reading this book felt like dreaming with cells, wolves, trees, and rivers in a place where “respiramos juntos” (“we breathe together”). This bilingual collection is a profound expression of Mexican eco-poetry.—Craig Santos Perez &nbsp;CONTRA NATURA | Rodolfo Hinostroza | Tr. by Anthony Seidman&nbsp;<img width="2136" height="1378" width_o="2136" height_o="1378" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2b023e05da16f84093e9b0d0eda6cd78acd78981f7e7ffeb16bbb82839ddb6c/Contranatura.jpg" data-mid="198070941" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2b023e05da16f84093e9b0d0eda6cd78acd78981f7e7ffeb16bbb82839ddb6c/Contranatura.jpg" /> The work of Rodolfo Hinostroza carries us into a world of physical &amp; spiritual poetry at its limits &amp; beyond: a further gift from the Southern continent in line with the likes of Vallejo, Huidobro &amp; Neruda, &amp; no less powerful for all its late emergence. For those of us who want &amp; need the fullness of a poetry unfettered, Contra Natura takes its place as one of our new essentials—a ripeness &amp; overabundance for which I’m truly grateful.—Jerome RothenbergKinetic, defiant, exuberant, furious, libidinous, and thunderously alive, Contra Natura is an interdisciplinary tour de force: a restorative, transformative riot in which world history, current events, languages, literature, astrology, and mathematics are radiantly fused in Rodolfo Hinostroza’s kaleidoscopic lens. Anthony Seidman’s translation is a marvel: attentive, inventive, agleam.—Robin Myers&nbsp;GARDENS | JARDINES | Carlos Cociña | Tr. by Ian U Lockaby&nbsp; <img width="2448" height="2088" width_o="2448" height_o="2088" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1c8071445db132baec0c0bb3863a2a485f1d61d298c59f18a987cae34aa8dd27/GARDENS-by-Carlos-Cocia-ins.jpg" data-mid="120377935" border="0" data-marker-id="2" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1c8071445db132baec0c0bb3863a2a485f1d61d298c59f18a987cae34aa8dd27/GARDENS-by-Carlos-Cocia-ins.jpg" /> 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 &nbsp;BOAT PEOPLE | Mayra Santos-Febres | Tr. by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario&nbsp; <img width="1200" height="813" width_o="1200" height_o="813" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e6191b1f8cb253b505b29e475cbb3c3eec175fa30726cb39f3f3a513c43bc168/Boat-People-Mayra-Santos-Febres.jpg" data-mid="120692240" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e6191b1f8cb253b505b29e475cbb3c3eec175fa30726cb39f3f3a513c43bc168/Boat-People-Mayra-Santos-Febres.jpg" /> Mayra Santos-Febres is one of our most powerful writers, and Boat People has long been a part of the poetic counter-tradition that shaped generations of Puerto Rican poets. Thanks to Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, English-language readers are now plunged into the depths of a text that, to echo Patrick Chamoiseau, is composed of "that strange conference of poets and great beings," lost at sea, tossed on shores, or caught in a world without return address or safe passage. Written like a border drawn on water, this oceanic book is both a source of life and a record of death. It remains as devastatingly urgent as the day it was written.—Raquel Salas Rivera “Mayra Santos-Febres’s collection Boat People, translated by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, addresses the oft-undiscussed topic of undocumented migration in the Caribbean. In a numbered series of poems that are sparse and beautiful and rending, both in form and in content, Santos-Febres creates devastating narratives time and again.”—Zoe Contros Kearl, Kenyon Review &nbsp;AWAITING MAJOR EVENTS | ESPERO GRANDES ACONTECIMIENTOS | Nurit Kasztelán | Tr. by Maureen Shaughnessy&nbsp; <img width="2448" height="2000" width_o="2448" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b592b669def96f8de984da2f4f112ad3af3adb4674df95a5e63b7ba8c64b3c76/Awaiting-Major-Events-Nurit-Kasztelanredes2.jpg" data-mid="120377956" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b592b669def96f8de984da2f4f112ad3af3adb4674df95a5e63b7ba8c64b3c76/Awaiting-Major-Events-Nurit-Kasztelanredes2.jpg" /><img width="1936" height="1200" width_o="1936" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a65a24ea631d812dc915926737044968dc9cba1ebbd9a51093151756145a39f/kasztelan2.jpg" data-mid="120377964" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2a65a24ea631d812dc915926737044968dc9cba1ebbd9a51093151756145a39f/kasztelan2.jpg" /> Awaiting Major Events invites us on a trip in space and time—to other rivers, other lands, where childhood and present are “tied like a knot.” Kasztelan writes with the five senses, delicately, the way you disentangle one plant from another, and so climb into fluctuation between the domestic and multiple “theres,” between the I and the “layers of other things,” between her own writing and references to the writing of others (Elizabeth Bishop, Ricardo Molinari, Irene Gruss). We arrive at the end of the book like we arrive home from a journey, “saturated with stimuli.” “What lingers after a trip?” The real possibility of getting back, or getting back to the glimmer of certain images: the filigree of a cameo, the broken branch of an olive tree, the language—with the skillful translation of Maureen Shaughnessy—of a forest that brings together the infinite and the consciousness of limit.—Silvina López Medin &nbsp;CARNATION AND TENEBRAE CANDLE | CLAVEL Y TENEBRARIO | Marosa di Giorgio | Tr. by Jeannine Marie Pitas&nbsp; <img width="1936" height="1296" width_o="1936" height_o="1296" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/315a9f57e785054b4893e5b8b37d9052ba7be5d6c61ee2d22101ce70b55c01d9/carnation4claro.jpg" data-mid="120378268" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/315a9f57e785054b4893e5b8b37d9052ba7be5d6c61ee2d22101ce70b55c01d9/carnation4claro.jpg" /> “This new collection by Marosa di Giorgio, long considered a major figure in Latin American literature, is the work of a translator who has immersed herself, with great thoughtfulness and dedication, in the life of a writer whose poetry is foreboding, mystical, dangerous and magnificent. Everywhere in di Giorgio's oeuvre, there are wars, crimes, monsters, possessed plants and animals, ghosts, illnesses and miracles animating a world that is always on the verge of explosion. Di Giorgio's writing is as foreboding as it is tentacular, as intricate as it is unsettling. Jeannine Marie Pitas' ongoing and remarkable engagement with di Giorgio has brought us an exciting and valuable gift.”—Daniel Borzutzky “Bursting with burning roses, foam, tulle, masks, disturbing gazes, and esoteric languages, Carnation and Tenebrae Candle participates in the baroque’s operations of concealment and revelation to test the limits of compulsory femininity and unsettle the Cartesian definition of the seeing subject.”—Zack Anderson, Action Books “All in all, this bilingual edition is a good doorway through which the English-speaking reader may enter an intense, suggestive, ghostly, and luminous work of poetry. Marosa Di Giorgio, one of the best Spanish-language poetic voices of the twentieth century, deserves to transcend the borders of her tongue.”—Juan de Marsilio, Latin American Literature Toda&nbsp;PIXEL FLESH | CARNE DE PIXEL | Agustín Fernández Mallo | Tr. by Zachary Rockwell Ludington&nbsp; <img width="8421" height="5722" width_o="8421" height_o="5722" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9cfd4f49d5538c7c52519538d2621fcb0889dbb06b79656fc21ef65486a9bdf2/Pixel-Flesh.jpg" data-mid="200884612" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9cfd4f49d5538c7c52519538d2621fcb0889dbb06b79656fc21ef65486a9bdf2/Pixel-Flesh.jpg" /> “Ludington’s translation, through its verbal re-presentation of Mallo’s circling poetics, effectively intensifies Mallo’s project, demonstrating a generative absence beyond memory and beyond language. Everything is unsettled; from this site of unsettledness, where even language is without center, Ludington translates around the impossibility of grasping absence.”—AM Ringwalt, Kenyon Review “Mallo’s text begs the question: what is human love in the pixel-age? Love and romance between two people is so slippery, especially in a cosmos affected by the fragile instantaneity because its expansion is always counteracted by the pervasive presence of black holes (where everything goes but nothing can be seen). This is not a hypothesis but a scientific and romantic reality in which loneliness cannot be overcome. But we persist because like black holes, love is both a herald of inevitable loss and yet a vessel teaming with matter.”—Eleanor Tennyson, SPAM “Behind the eyelids or in front of them, the world is awash with information; this information contains patterns and poems, and pushes the field further. Pixel Flesh is fascinating as a paper book that relays concepts more often suited for screens. Calling into question so many aspects of our postmodern reality, Mallo has written a book for the present. It may not read comfortably, but it is, like the black holes regularly mentioned, both vast and dense at once.”—Greg Bem, Rain Taxi &nbsp;ROOM IN ROME | HABITACIÓN EN ROMA | Jorge Eduardo Eielson | Tr. by David Shook&nbsp;<img width="1200" height="803" width_o="1200" height_o="803" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6b637bd8741ed8ece5ba178f637d5edd62eb189dac209718643b4b0568e4ab40/Room-in-Rome-Jorge-Eduardo-Eielson-David-Shook.jpg" data-mid="120686712" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6b637bd8741ed8ece5ba178f637d5edd62eb189dac209718643b4b0568e4ab40/Room-in-Rome-Jorge-Eduardo-Eielson-David-Shook.jpg" /> “This bilingual edition of Room in Rome is certainly one we should celebrate, not only because it puts Eielson’s poetry into the hands of new readers, but also because the artistic quality of this book makes for a spectacular entry into the creative universe of a true artist who left behind a rich, expressive and multifaceted life’s work.”—César Ferreira, Latin American Literature Today&nbsp; “From its title, Room in Rome counterposes the temporal and spatial expansiveness of Rome with a transient, walled-in room. It is from this knotted perspective that Eielson and Shook re-arrange coordinates of time, space, and language, blurring the dividing lines between the Roman/the Peruvian, the ancient/the contemporary, the national/the personal, the awe-inspiring/the agonizing.”—Olivia Lott, Reading in Translation “David Shook has done a remarkable job in conveying Eielson’s earthy, precarious tone, making him available to the wider audience the poems deserve. There is a poem magically titled “Alongside the Tiber, Putrefaction Twinkles Gloriously”—Shook has effectively captured that twinkling.”—Sergio Sarano, Asymptote