Books
Immigration Detention in Rhode Island from Origins to End: A Brief History
Future Document
Forthcoming May 2026The Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island
is an institution with a sordid record of medical neglect and abuse—and presently
imprisons around 110 people per night through a contract with Immigration and
Customs Enforcement. The Wyatt represents one node in a transnational web of
detention and deportation. Yet the detention system, and its presence in Rhode
Island, has a history— it has not always existed, and it will end. This Brief
History asks: How can we locate immigration detention in Rhode Island in
relation to historical time? Written in the past tense about a
still-unfolding present, this Brief History draws on archival documents to connect
the dots between colonial underpinnings, the earliest contracts for detention space
leased by the Immigration Service in Providence in the 1910s, and the legislative
campaign to end contracts for immigration detention in Rhode Island in the
2020s. A source-based account of the past culminating in a speculative history
of the present, this Brief History signals a future not foreclosed.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’
by Victoria Guerrero-Peirano, translated by Honora Spicer
Tripwire Editions
Forthcoming June 1, 2026
> Pre-order via Asterism Books
Winner of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture’s 2020 National Literature
Award in Nonfiction. And death shall have no dominion / Killing ‘The
Mother’ charts death inside healthcare bureaucracy through brutal,
surreal and fragmentary poetic prose, grappling with the capitalist
devastation of systems of social care and how writing might enact forms
of conception in the face of such conditions. Victoria Guerrero-Peirano
has been recognized as one of the most singular and powerful voices of
contemporary Peruvian poetry.
Excerpt
> Translation Tuesday, Asymptote, July 2024
Essay
> Spitting Sutures, Asymptote, July 2024
Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress
by Victoria Guerrero, translated by Honora Spicer and Anastatia Spicer
Designed by Mutandis
Covers letterpress printed at Bidon Community Printshop in Providence, RI
Hand-bound at des/centro de poesía in Providence, RI
Cardboard House Press
2025
> Order
This book of threads binds the autobiographical and the bureaucratic, the maternal body and the factory floor. In fierce and tender lines, contemporary Peruvian poet Victoria Guerrero-Peirano pierces intergenerational silences with erupting screams. Three scenes probe the precarity of textile lineages tensioned against patriarchal violence and neoliberal industrial orders. “I leave words,” a daughter speaks in the face of her mother’s tactile engrossment, tangling with doubt what it means to “know enough” by a life of letters. Of immigrant seamstresses killed in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in United States history, the poet asks: “can poetry speak?” And a state’s forced sterilizations inhibit women from practicing traditional weaving by kallwa, shaping a verse of testimony. In the face of multiple unfolding violences and ruptures in practices of world-making, the Diary declares, “We seamstresses are timeless.”
Review
> Jill Magi, “A Call to Take Up Thread” @ Jacket2
Excerpts
> Poesía en Acción, Action Books, November 15, 2022
> Temporary Archives: Poetry by Women of Latin America, ed. by Juana Adcock and Jèssica Pujol Duran ARC Publications, November 2022
> Poem-A-Day Academy of American Poets, September 6, 2021
> Asymptote Journal, October 2020
> American Literary Translators Association Conference, October 2020
Interview
> Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress: An Interview with Honora Spicer and Anastatia Spicer By Austyn Wohlers on Action Books Blog, December 2020
And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing
by Tilsa Otta, translated by Honora Spicer
Cardboard House Press
2023
Cartonera edition with letterpress covers, handmade in Spanish-bilingual bookmaking workshops
> Order
Excerpts
> Hormone of Darkness, Poetry Daily, September 8, 2023
> Three Poems, Latin American Literature Today, November 2020
Reviews
> Diego Báez @ Letras Latinas Blog
> Katherine M. Hedeen @ Action Books Micro-Reviews of Poetry in Translation
> Greg Bem @ Hopscotch Translation
Interview
> ‘Traduzco a poetas mujeres para cambiar el canon’: Entrevista en Lima en Escena, September 2023
Photo credit: Ryan Greene at Shut Eye Press in Phoenix, AZ. Book design by Mutandis.
Writing
Recent
Profiting in Nowhereland
Boston Review, November 2025
The sordid histories behind Texas’s new industrial-scale immigration detention center, Camp East Montana.
Post Colonialism
Boston Review, September 2024
Along a recently designated historic trail on the U.S.-Mexico border, colonial legacies hide in plain sight.
Essays
Sobre la poesía documental: un intertexto con Giancarlo Huapaya, Jose Antonio Villarán y Honora Spicer
Pesapalabra 9, July 2024 (PDF)
Spitting Sutures
Asymptote, July 2024
A poetics of proximity, Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, February 2022
Orienting to Im/mobility, Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, September 2021
ICE deportation flights continue out of El Paso airport despite COVID-19, El Paso Matters, May 2020
Closing Nazareth: On Shelter, The Rumpus, May 2019
Poetry
A Spatial Formula & POST BOND folio, The Georgia Review, forthcoming
'Hawkins
Boulevard' from POST BOND, Tripwire Journal 18: Achive Fervor,
September 2021
Poems in Translation
from The Ages by Teresa Cabrera, translated by Honora Spicer
A Perfect Vacuum, July 2023
Tripwire 20, July 2024
Reviews of Poetry & Translation
“Deep alongsideness”: translating the city in parentheses, quotation, and book objects: A review of Claudina Domingo’s ‘Transit’ translated by Ryan Greene (Eulalia Books, 2024)
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, October 2024
Sobre [gamerover], de Giancarlo Huapaya
Revista Quehacer, December 2023
Reading Margo Tamez’s Father / Genocide
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, September 2023
'You' and the poetics of slow violence: Reading Jose Antonio Villarán's 'Open Pit: A Story About Morococha and Extractivism in the Américas'
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, May 2023
’Make absence more conspicuous’: In Conversation with Celina Su
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, March 2023
'Attention is the most important thing we can give to one another'
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, November 2021
Reading JD Pluecker's 'Swamps Fly'
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, November 2021
Reading 'Los muros no son para siempre'/'Walls are not forever'
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, October 2021
Reading Yousif M. Qasmiyeh's 'Writing the Camp',
Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, October 2021
A review of Mayra Santos-Febres' Boat People, translated from Spanish by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
World Literature Today, October 2021
Claiming the Canon: Magda Portal’s ‘Hope and the Sea,’ Translated from Spanish by Kathleen Weaver
Reading in Translation, forthcoming October 4, 2021
Review of Augustín Fernández Mallo, Pixel Flesh, trans. Zachary Rockwell Ludington
World Literature Today, July 2021
The Symphonic Tongue: A review of Giancarlo Huapaya's Sub Verse Workshop, translated by Ilana Dann Luna
Poesía en Acción, Action Books, February 2021
Honora Spicer reviews Carnation and Tenebrae Candle by Marosa di Giorgio translated from the Spanish by Jeannine Marie Pitas (Cardboard House Press, 2020)
Asymptote, January 2021
Words are the Currency of the Body: Reading Susan Briante's Defacing the Monument at the Border
The Adroit Journal, August 2020
To Kate, From the Border of Another Desert: A Letter to Kate Harris, Author of Lands of Lost Borders, from a cyclist on the US/Mexico Border
Cyclista Zine, Issue 1, Fall 2019
Honora Spicer
> Historian, poet, literary translator
> Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University researching physical and textual infrastructures of the U.S. state
> Writing POST BOND: El Paso and the Infrastructure of Empire, 1845-1967
> Associate Editor, Cardboard House Press
> des/centro de poesía
language justice project in Providence, RI
Contact:
hspicer@fas.harvard.edu
Photo credit: Gianca Huapaya
News & Recent / Upcoming Events
> Tripwire: Transnational Poetics Reading
New Orleans Poetry Festival
Saturday, April 18, 2026, 4pm
> Shitholes of the World, Unite: A Reading of Poetry in Translation
New Orleans Poetry Festival
Friday, April 17, 2026, 1pm
> Cardboard House Press @
New Orleans Poetry Festival Book Fair
April 17-19, 2026
> Cardboard House Press @ RISD Unbound Art Book Fair
Fleet Library, Providence, RI
April 11, 2026
> Cardboard House Press @ Multiple Formats Art Book Fair
Boston, MA
March 21, 2026
> Infrastructures of Empire
Roundtable with Erika Bsumek, Alyssa Kreikemeier and Lois Rosson
American Society for Environmental History Conference
Kansas City
March 26, 2026
> Cardboard House Press @ AWP Bookfair
Baltimore, MD
March 5-7, 2026
>
Histories
of Documentalities in El Paso
Guest Lecture @ University of Texas at El Paso
February 16, 2026
Research Areas
> 19th
and 20th-century United States history
> Borderlands,
immigration & carceral geography
> Infrastructure & urban history
> Documentary
poetry
> Cartography
&
counter-mapping
Teaching
> What does it mean to know where and when we are?
> Orienting to time and place
> Experiential education
> Place-based history
> Counter-mapping in Poetry, 2022-2025
Workshop series in collaboration with Gianca Huapaya
With support from: Harvard University Mellon Urban Initiative, EPCC/UTEP Mellon Humanities Collaborative, des/centro de poesía
In this poetry workshop, we investigate visual and textual forms of
representing spaces at the intersection of poetry and cartography.
Grounded in the visual/textual practice of poets and artists from the
Latin American avant-garde, concrete poetry, documentary poetry, and
critical cartography, we will excavate accumulations of power in public
spaces to understand how what we can see has been formed, and how that
formation affects our perception here and now. This workshop is designed
for poets interested in integrating new tools, literary traditions, and
spatial and ethical orientations in their practice, and to develop an
investigative project about a place with which they are in relation. The
workshop will be facilitated in Spanish and English, but participants
do not need to be bilingual.
Below: Reading artists’ books and counter-maps in the Harvard Map Collection, 2023
> Teaching Fellow in the Harvard University Department of History, 2022-2024
Borders; What is Urban History?; What is Legal History?
> El Paso Community College History Instructor, 2020-2022
United States History Surveys
> Mellon Humanities Collaborative Faculty Fellow, 2021-2022
Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Creating Soundwalks to Experience Disappeared Histories
Below: Public humanities walking event near ICE detention facility on Montana Ave., El Paso, TX, 2022
>Place-based United States History, 2021-2022
Online and experiential course
> Hurricane Island Outward Bound School Lead
Instructor in Backpacking, Flat water and Whitewater Canoeing & Rock
Climbing, Seasonally 2011-2021
357 field days leading wilderness expeditions with young adults
Below: Teaching River Reading on the Androscoggin River, Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, Maine, 2019
Last Updated 24.10.31