Note: This piece was originally published in 66:3/4 & 67:1: Small Press Poetry in the United States.
It’s after 10 p.m. when I finally land in San Juan and my friend Luis Othoniel Rosa picks me up so we can drive two hours west along Puerto Rico’s northern rim to Isabela, the coastal town where Nicole Cecilia Delgado lives. We drive through the city; I wonder which tall buildings are owned by absentee landlords. We pass the sprawling suburbia of Bayamón and the nestled mountain towns looming beneath the green covering that ascends in the distance on our left. I hear the coquí for the first time, and Luis tells me that their rhythms have changed since Maria.
Nicole’s home, a white-stucco multilevel building, sits on a corner just below Isabela’s quaint town square. A rooftop balcony filled with twinkly lights and nurtured plants welcomes us. Nicole has made lentils. It’s warm. I have come from winter in Nebraska. The ocean is visible over the houses sloping down the hill. There it is, about a mile out—that darkest blue sea of the late night.
Nicole and Amanda Hernández codirect La Impresora, a small-scale independent printing studio and press in Puerto Rico for poets and visual artists. I am there to finish a translation of a hybrid text by Luis, Calima, which La Impresora is publishing. And I am there to get to know Nicole, whose book añosluz I have also started translating.
It’s late now. Luis, Nicole, and I have stayed up talking under the night sky. I know I have misunderstood large parts of our conversation, both because of my Spanish fluency level and because Luis and Nicole are old friends. Luis nudges us to plan out tomorrow’s work. Nicole suggests we start with coffee and a quick swim at Playa Jobos—brilliant, calm sea of the early morning.
In the translator’s note to Delgado’s most recent collection, islas adyacentes / adjacent islands (2023), published as a collaboration by Ugly Duckling Presse, Doublecross Press, and La Impresora, Urayoán Noel speaks to Nicole’s “radically communitarian” work as a writer, editor, publisher, and bookmaker.[1] This introduction takes the form of a letter to Nicole that points to such work by asking her a series of questions regarding the dynamics of their friendship, their political commitments, the use of technology, and the geopolitical situations of Mona and Vieques, two smaller islands on either side of Puerto Rico. These islands, and the camping trips Nicole took to them, structure the sequences of the book, which she’s on a deadline to finish while I’m there. Just a few small printing details to sort out: a dark turquoise and orange center band that enfolds the book, a small accoutrement to heighten the reader’s sensation of opening something handmade. I move soy-based, nontoxic ink drums in and out of the printer. Nicole’s hands fold a test band around a spine. Everything is tactile.
Noel calls Delgado’s poetry a practice of “counter-archive,” that which not only documents the body as it survives but also orients and activates it in the process of documentation.[2] La Impresora is this, too. It moves with a commitment to place and to artists and writers encountered “en el camino,” as Nicole says.[3] The press is a revolving door where volunteers, friends, and collaborators exchange projects and skills. There is an along-the-way mentality at play. Each thing treated with care, each book with its particular set of questions and design needs. La Impresora is a practical and alchemical project, protective but not insular—discerning, nurturing, and wild.
“I think I’ve always been at odds with intellectual work,” Nicole writes in islas adyacentes, “perhaps because when I was a girl I felt that it imposed a slightly cruel distance from everything that was healthy and simple, like community. Over the years, I’ve tried to defend a type of creation, poetry, writing that can be that: physical work, bodily activity, the use of tools, movement in space.”[4] I understand Nicole’s pointed use of the word intellectual here—the way institutions threaten to carry one’s poetics away from the corporeal. I was drawn to translation work because I felt my instincts as a writer and reader moving toward a deeper study of linguistic subtleties, but I also wanted a human connection—movement—to exist beyond languages. There is a kinship between my work as a translator, my attempts to keep one foot out of academia, and Nicole’s commitment to physical making.
I follow Nicole to the guillotine to cut a proof of Calima to our desired size. It will be thick and rectangular with a flipbook element. She reaches up for the blade’s handle, then bends her back and knees slowly—the sound of stacked paper chopped through. I don’t realize Luis has taken a photo of us, but later when he sends it to me, I study myself watching her. We are both smiling, and to my surprise, I look at ease.
§
Where other institutions have undervalued the power of the handmade book, La Impresora has served as a kind of trade school, partnering with writers and artists interested in learning the craft. Recently, the press published an anthology titled Ese lugar violento que llamamos normalidad (That violent place we call normality), which collects the work of ten poets who participated in an intensive editing and bookmaking workshop taught by Nicole and Xavier Valcárcel.[5] Valcárcel was one of the first writers published by La Impresora in their foundational series Trabajo de Poesía, and is a longtime friend and collaborator of Nicole’s who runs Atarraya Cartonera, an editorial project they started together in 2009.
La Impresora, for its part, originated in 2015 and was located on Avenida Fernández Juncos in South Santurce. In 2017, the press moved to a small street near Calle Loíza, a happening and gentrifying area just blocks from the beach in San Juan. When Nicole purchased the building in Isabela in 2020, the press’s main operations moved beyond the city’s hustle. The space in Isabela is three stories: the printing studio on the first floor, which contains two single-color risograph printers, a half wall of thirteen ink drums, a guillotine, a long closet of paper, a collection of bookmaking tools, and a cozy room for visiting artists; the second floor is Nicole’s home; and then, of course, the rooftop balcony.
Nicole tells me moving out of the city has allowed her and Amanda to think beyond the idea of the metropolis as artistic center, though it’s clear this impulse has always been a part of their ethos. They are not simply publishing authors on the fringes—the press, and Nicole as a writer, are committed to refiguring conceptions of centrality altogether. Nicole writes, “From Vieques / Puerto Rico / is / El Yunque. // Solid vision / that shifts the horizon and sustains it.”[6] El Yunque refers to one of the rainforest’s most beloved peaks—a word the Spanish used to describe the benevolent Taíno god Yúcahu, who protects his worshippers from the god of chaos and hurricanes. From the north shore of Vieques, the only thing visible on the main island might be the mountains, might be—though it is not the tallest—El Yunque. The mountain metaphorically obscures San Juan, too far to be visible at all, and this topographical refiguration of a center offers a framework for understanding La Impresora’s publishing instincts. In his letter, Noel explains how La Impresora has often worked with those from “other spaces (the western region of Puerto Rico, Chiapas, Nuyorican Loisaida or El Barrio, a certain Santurce) less visible in official histories.”[7] La piel del arrecife, an anthology of poetry by trans Puerto Ricans edited by Raquel Albarrán, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, and Val Arboniés Flores, collects the work of over twenty writers and is available online as a free PDF. Arrecife means reef, and the collection is organized into four sections that, the editors explain, “correspond to characteristics our communities share with the reefs, in the overflowing context of multiple and complex engenderings witnessed by our ancestors.”[8] The anthology plays with many forms of queering language in Spanish. In one of my favorite small poems, “Notita,” Liev A. Santos uses the final line to replace the masculine letter -o in solo with the letter -e. In English, sole means a singular thing or a type of fish, but the word is pronounced like sol, the Spanish word for sun. Here is the whole poem:
Solo te quiero decir
que cuando te sientas solx
yo estaré aquí pa’ ti
aunque a veces yo me sienta sole.[9]
In an appendix, Nicole, Amanda, and two of the anthology’s editors offer some notes on the process of making the book. This section illustrates La Impresora’s multidimensional commitment to community building. The final push to realize the project came from experiences of shared grief and commemoration: editor Raquel Albarrán and Alexandr Milán, a beloved trans activist, both died within a few days of each other in September 2022. Nicole writes, “En honor y amor a elles decidimos liberar este libro al universo, desde una perspectiva abolicionista (como Raquel A. hubiera querido), en su versión actual, sin hacer ediciones adicionales. Sean sus cabos sueltos parte de su belleza y que su brillo se expanda en todas direcciones.”[10] And Salas Rivera, in his note, shares a moment that helped him choose his name: “Mi nombre es Roque. Ese nombre que escogí, me lo sugirió por primera vez Raquel Albarrán, una de mis mejores amigas, en una llamada telefónica.”[11]
Water Ripples by Jacqueline Jiang, a debut collection La Impresora published just this year, also answers to the press’s vision and aesthetic values. It includes a loose broadside featuring a brilliant and horrifying story about shark fin soup and death titled—cleverly—Fin. The poems in the book offer a tonal contrast to the broadside’s story, making the whole project feel layered, strange, and delightful. The poems attempt to make sense of being born in Puerto Rico to Chinese parents. Some of the poems are entirely in English or Spanish, some play with Spanglish, and others weave Chinese mythology into the poet’s mythmaking. The book asks: What is possible for our identities as we consider and construct our histories? In “La China: Atabey,” Jiang invokes Atabey—a spirit in Taíno mythology who birthed herself—to meander through her own self-creation. Jiang writes:
On the inside, I am la guerrera only.
There isn’t a word in the dictionary to sample
the pronunciations that come out of my mouth,
no image that can paint the picture of
my Chinese lips reciting Pedro Albizu Campos
in street Spanish.[12]
Here Jiang turns the interiority of a word into sound and then into image and finally back into sound. The stanza is a theoretical musing on how the poet formulates themself through the ethnic and linguistic dissonance of their lived experience. Near the end of the poem, she writes:
If my soul was sewn together to this land
many lives ago,
then I have finally arrived,
[…]
I can swim in the Carribbean Sea
I can speak the Taíno terms I have learned,
lay in my hamaca under the sun
and look to Atabey with satisfaction.[13]
§
When I meet Amanda, it’s late morning. She’s unloading boxes of La Impresora’s books from her trunk to display at a local pop-up fair for handmade goods. We have driven into Manatí, a small town halfway to San Juan. A big house in the center square has been converted into a community space. Amanda, waving her hands to hurry up, bickers with Nicole about something I don’t catch. I can tell she is funny. Amanda is also a poet: she’s published four collections with La Impresora, and Yellow Struck, an English translation of her 2016 collection Entre tanto amarillo, was recently published by Editorial Pulpo.
Luis and I run to pick up fried-food reinforcements, and when we return, Nicole and Amanda are sitting behind their display laughing. I sit down and try not to be imposing, though I want to know about Amanda’s cool leg tattoos. Nicole holds a paper cup of fresh coffee from the small-batch brewer next to us. Her dark, short, wavy hair is still a little wet. I wander around the booths making a list in my head of which books I want most from La Impresora. For now, I end up with Mara Pastor’s Las horas extra (2022) from the series on contemporary poetry Trabajo de Poesía; Francisco Félix’s Sobre los domingos (2019/2021) from the press’s Crónica series, which features experimental nonfiction; and finally, a folded broadside of “Fresas / Strawberries” by Ana Portnoy Brimmer from the series Poema Suelto, which features individual poems in beautifully produced pamphlets. Luis buys a tote bag with Bayamón’s suburban sprawl screen printed on the front. When it’s time to pack up, a chatty gentleman catches Amanda with a stream of questions that answer themselves. Amanda smiles, exudes patience, then she and Nicole side-eye each other, and I sense their whole world of humor, clairvoyance, and dedication.
The two women started working together in La Impresora’s early days. Nicole had just figured out how to purchase the press’s first riso printer during a residency at Beta-Local, an organization in San Juan that supports contemporary art projects, and Amanda needed an internship to finish her MA in Arts and Cultural Management from the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. Originally Amanda’s internship was unpaid, but their meeting coincided with a contract granted by the city of San Juan to organize FLIA (La Feria de Libros Independientes y Alternativos de Puerto Rico), a bookfair Nicole had been hosting since 2012. The contract allowed Nicole to offer Amanda a stipend, and they organized FLIA for four years until it was put on pause due to the pandemic. As they realized they could generate income together around projects they loved, things got more serious.
§
From a foot of fresh snow in Nebraska, I reconnect with Nicole and Amanda over Zoom a few months after my visit. Amanda is in San Juan, where she lives and maintains the press’s smaller studio. From there, she handles a chunk of the distribution to local bookstores, cafés, pop-ups, museum stores, bookfairs, and university libraries, which occasionally purchase large selections of their inventory. Here she also finishes binding many of La Impresora’s books by hand, one of her favorite parts of the work. Risograph printing is an analog process. It’s mechanized screen printing. After a text has been formatted digitally, proofs are made to accurately situate text, image, and color alignments. These are meticulous adjustments. Even after everything is corrected, the process results in minor imperfections and variations. Amanda calls these “the virtues of the object itself.” We fix our hair in the camera. I see a single risograph printer covered in stickers and the edge of a large worktable behind her.
Nicole signs on from Isabela, her face framed by a wall of books and her dog Luna in the corner. I ask them what has changed about La Impresora since the press received a large employment-initiative grant from the Centro de Economía Creativa in Puerto Rico in 2022, which allows them to support themselves with annual salaries, healthcare, and a $20,000 yearly budget for the organization’s creative projects over a three-year period.[14]
“The hustle,” Nicole says. This recent initiative has shifted their sense of well-being and peace of mind entirely. Nicole hasn’t had a fixed salary in nearly twenty years, and it’s Amanda’s first one ever. The grant has meant they can dedicate themselves fully to La Impresora, moving their attention to projects that were neglected simply because there was no budget. For this extended moment, they’ve been able to systemize their workflows and calendars, and focus on their series with a deeper sense of curatorial purpose. This refreshing stability has also honed their working relationship. “Amanda thinks systematically, and she’s fast,” Nicole says, “I think abstractly and handle the conceptualization of things.” “Sometimes I struggle with being direct,” Amanda says, smiling, “and Nicole does not.” They balance each other out, and they’ve achieved their rhythms organically. They listen to one another. Their mutual support and understanding run deep.
In January of this year, Penguin Random House and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) announced La Impresora as the winner of the $10,000 Constellation Award, which honors an independent literary press championing the writing of people of color.[15] And in November, Nicole’s poetry was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition “‘No existe un mundo poshuracán’: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” which also featured many of La Impresora’s collaborators.[16] The Whitney purchased a large selection of their catalog for its museum store. Nicole says, “It really is the first place our books are being sold in New York,” though La Impresora has always worked within the visual arts, which has often expanded their connections and curatorial understanding beyond what Nicole sees as the more conservative and insular networks of the literary world.
§
Nicole first encountered a risograph machine while living in México City around 2008. A group of radical feminist women, older than her, had run a magazine in the ’90s—vanguards of a technology and print studio they had moved on from by the time Nicole arrived.[17] But there was a young woman taking care of the collective’s house who noticed Nicole’s handmade books and showed her two printers and a mountain of tools not being used in a room behind the kitchen. To reactivate the space, she invited Nicole to teach a workshop for women poets. “And the workshop ended, and things changed, and I forgot about the machine,” she says. Nicole started seriously considering the machine for her work years later during her residency at Beta-Local when the risograph was experiencing a resurgence due to its efficiency and ecological character. She says her body remembered how to use it. Amanda and I smile through our cameras. “The skills women give each other along the way,” I respond.
When I ask them to comment on the future of the press, Nicole says, “Well, we have two years left of the employment grant and new machines that will endure.” Amanda mentions FLIA and says they know how to return to the hustle of commissions, writing grants, and applying to scholarships.
When I ask them to tell me what it is they make and why, they say, “Libros lindos.”
Then they conjure stories from their childhoods. Girls making collages—folding, cutting, gluing paper. Girls imagining and editing worlds with their hands. Girls binding together things that appear frivolous but are not. Folding paper is intimate; to unfold is to open. Amanda says, “It wasn’t until it started to happen that I understood this beautiful dream was a possibility.”
Notes:
[1] Urayoán Noel, “Translator’s Note,” in Nicole Cecilia Delgado, islas adyacentes / adjacent islands, trans. Urayoán Noel (New York, NY, and Isabella, Puerto Rico: Ugly Duckling Presse, Doublecross Press, and La Impresora, 2023), 35.
[2] Noel, “Translator’s Note,” 36.
[3] I interviewed Nicole and Amanda via Zoom on February 15, 2023. I pulled and translated this quote—and the others included throughout the profile—directly from that interview.
[4] Delgado, islas adyacentes / adjacent islands, 7.
[5] The anthology Ese lugar violento que llamamos normalidad may be found in La Impresora’s online store. See also Xavier Valcárcel, Fe de calendario (Isabella, Puerto Rico: La Impresora, 2016).
[6] Delgado, islas adyacentes / adjacent islands, 21.
[7] Urayoán Noel, “a correspondence (summer 2020),” in Delgado, islas adyacentes / adjacent islands, 5.
[8] La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña, eds. Raquel Albarrán, Val Arboniés Flores, and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (Isabella, Puerto Rico: La Impresora, 2023), 7. I’ve translated this sentence from the anthology’s introduction for the sake of clarity: “Las secciones del libro corresponden a características que comparten nuestras comunidades con los arrecifes, en el contexto rebosante de múltiples y complejos engendramientos que testimoniaron nuestrxs ancestrxs.”
[9] Liev A. Santos, “Notita,” in La piel del arrecife, 59.
[10] Nicole Cecilia Delgado, “Notas a esta edición,” in La piel del arrecife, 72. I chose to leave this quote in Spanish in the body of this essay because that is the language Delgado offers in the anthology itself, and I wanted to preserve some sense of intimacy and privacy. Here, in the endnote, I offer my translation: “In honor and love of these two people we decided to release this book to the universe, from an abolitionist perspective (like Raquel A. would have wanted), in its current version, without additional editing. May its loose ends be part of its beauty and may its brilliance expand in all directions.”
[11] Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, “Notas a esta edición,” in La piel del arrecife, 73. See the previous note for my translation rationale. In English, this quotation might read: “My name is Roque. That name was first suggested to me by Raquel Albarrán, one of my best friends. We were talking on the phone.”
[12] Jacqueline Jiang, Water Ripples (Isabella, Puerto Rico: La Impresora, 2023), 23.
[13] Jiang, Water Ripples, 24.
[14] Mellon Foundation News, “Centro de Economía Creativa and Mellon Foundation Announce ‘Maniobra’ in Puerto Rico,” May 2, 2022, https://www. mellon.org/news/centro-de-economia-creativa-and-mellon-foundation- announce-maniobra/es.
[15] Community of Literary Magazine and Presses (CLMP), “Member Spotlight: La Impresora | Perfil: La Impresora,” January 17, 2023, https:// www.clmp.org/news/award-spotlight-la-impresora-perfil-la-impresora/.
[16] This line is borrowed from Salas Rivera’s poetry collection while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Minneapolis: Birds LLC, 2019), unpaginated, footnote 20.
[17] For more information on this collective and their magazine La correa feminista, see the archival project “Digitalización de los archivos Históricos del Feminismo en México,” which has preserved multiple feminist magazines from the mid- to late-twentieth century and is housed at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Information is available online at https:// archivos-feministas.cieg.unam.mx.