[04/08/26] Román, Carlos Soto & Parra, Carlos Cardani: ANTUCO

Cardboard House Press, paperback

Translated by Judah Rubin

Publication Date: April 8, 2026

Publisher Marketing: A molecular accounting of the slow congealing of human flesh, Antuco is a condemnation of the tragedy at the root of authority, the expendability of human life undergirding military hierarchy and the nation-state itself. In the largest peacetime loss of life in Chilean military history, dozens of Chilean conscript soldiers froze to death during a 2005 alpine military training exercise at the Antuco volcano. Engaging documentary and visual modes to submerge the reader in whiteout, Antuco compacts a devastating coagulation of eco-poetics and social poetics to document the tragedy and its aftermath, through hymns and combat clothing labels alongside chemical formulas and military orders. In Antuco's polyvocality we see the interstices, the crevices from which hegemony seeps, as well as the con-scripted relationship of reader and writer, event and mediation, in the fractured and fracturing parallax frames that we call history. When Cardani Parra and Soto Román write of ice, it is commentary on the social body at large, the shattering consequences of just following orders: "freezing is a change in the physical state / a reordering of the molecular structure."

In May 2005, young conscripts to the Chilean Army were sent into whiteout conditions on a training mission dressed in cotton-polyester uniforms by officers dressed in 3-layer Gore-Tex Pro. At least forty-four of them died. 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 Poeticas

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. You’ll never look at winter storms or stormtroopers the same way again.—Mark Nowak, author of Social Poetics

In 2005, a whiteout storm and a series of terrible decisions turn a military training campaign on the Antuco volcano into a tragedy for the Chilean army resulting in the deaths of 44 men. Out of the evidence, documentarians Carlos Cardani Parra and Carlos Soto Román create a series of poems that serve as both a memorial and an indictment. Hypermasculine creeds and meaningless orders ring as hollow and distant as snow falling “in a Christmas story from another hemisphere.” Every page builds a case against the hubris of the military command and humanizes the conscripts, the “majority [of whom] die in the fetal position” clutching their firearms. Lyric 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

In this riveting and gut-wrenching book, a tragedy of the past frames the present while reaching for a different future. As authoritarianism cozies up to mega-corporations, as military hardware manufacturers and private prisons reap profits, as billionaires grift and safety nets disintegrate, we are told to just follow orders and march into the blinding snow. Antuco is a document, a parable, and a reminder that we can—and must—choose otherwise.—Jena Osman, author of A Very Large Array