For Cardboard House Press, a Phoenix-based bilingual publisher of Latin American and Spanish poetry in translation, the everyday material in its name is central to how it thinks about—and makes—books. Cardboard House’s catalog is largely inspired by the cartonera publishing movement in Latin America, says founder and editorial director Giancarlo Huapaya. The grassroots phenomenon began in Argentina in 2003 and centers on the production of handmade books using cardboard, which is cheap and readily accessible.
Since its start in 2014, Cardboard House has hosted 120 bookmaking workshops across the country, from Brooklyn to Bloomington, Ind., to Santa Cruz, Calif. In addition to its chapbooks and cardboard books, which are assembled by hand in community workshops run by a team of volunteer bookmakers called the Cartonera Collective, the nonprofit press also publishes full-length paperback poetry collections, which are printed by Ingram and Bookmobile but feature handmade jackets.
In its publishing and its programming, Cardboard House has developed a sort of polyglot ethics, pointing toward what Huapaya describes as “two broader goals: to create spaces for language justice and to re-form and reformulate audiences.” The press’s workshops, readings, board meetings, and conversations with volunteers generally occur bilingually, between English and Spanish.
Cardboard House has so far built a list of 48 titles, all of which are bilingual editions. Its most popular sellers include Album of Fences by the Mexican poet Omar Pimienta and Boat People by the Puerto Rican poet Mayra Santos-Febres, both of which address life and politics along different U.S. borders, as well as The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems by the Peruvian poet César Moro, the only Latin American to participate in the original Surrealist movement. All titles—whether made by hand or by machine—receive ISBNs and are distributed by Asterism.
The press generally prioritizes authors who have not yet been translated into English, and hopes to serve as a springboard for them to find homes at larger presses. In 2023, Cardboard House introduced anglophone readers to the Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta with the publication of And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing; Graywolf Press went on to publish her collected poems, The Hormone of Darkness, the following year.
“The way poetry is written in Latin America is not institutionalized in the same way writing is in the United States,” Huapaya says. “It’s hard to sustain oneself in a publishing market shaped by institutional power, the MFA, competition, and the author-as-brand and dominated by English.”
With typical print runs of 800–1,000 copies for paperback collections and 350–550 copies for chapbooks and cardboard books, Cardboard House can’t sustain its efforts through book sales alone. Grants and individual donors help fill the gap, says board member Honora Spicer, but the press has long “operated on a shoestring budget through the work of volunteers and many in-kind donations of space, materials and expertise.”
At the same time, “part of what makes Cardboard House and other small presses exist is working at a scale that’s sustainable for us,” says Cartonera Collective member Ryan Greene. “There are modes of engagement with books beyond simply buying them. These are things we make together.”
A version of this article appeared in the 08/04/2025 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: POETRY OUTSIDE THE BOX