[07/04/26] Zaidenwerg-Dib, Ezequiel: Declaration of Independence

Cardboard House Press, chapbook

Translated by Hernán Bravo Varela

Publication Date: July 4, 2026

Publisher Marketing: This documentary poem, constructed exclusively from the United States Declaration of Independence, pits the founding archive against the somatic immediacy of a body politic. Unfolding original syntax to probe the pathology of American masculinity, Ezequiel Zaidenwerg-Dib 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 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.”