About the Book
Winner of Mexico's 2018 Gilberto Owen National Prize for Literature. Karen Villeda's String Theory is a long autobiographical poem that explores the death of a family member through the intimacy of kinship and a shared name: the death of the poet's aunt, also named Karen, within a few weeks of the author's birth. A crucial ambiguity at the heart of this exploration is whether the aunt's death by hanging was a suicide or a murder, and whether that distinction can truly be made in a context of recurrent gender-based violence.
About the Author :
Karen Villeda was born in Tlaxcala, Mexico in 1985. To date, she has published three non-fiction books, seven collections of poetry, and three children's books. Her most recent are Teoría de cuerdas (Vaso Roto, 2023) and Anna y Hans [Anna and Hans] (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2021). Her work has been recognized with over fifteen literary prizes, including the 2018 Gilberto Owen Prize, and has been translated into several languages including German, Arabic, French, Greek, Portuguese, and English. Her book Dodo is held in the US Library of Congress's Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, one of only a handful of works by women writers from Mexico to form part of this collection. In 2015, she participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and, in 2018, was a Resident Writer at the Vermont Studio Center. In 2021, she received the Golden Page Fellowship, for writers under the age of forty. Her work has received support from the ]Pollock-Krasner] ]Foundation, ]] Open] ]Society] ]Foundations, ] ]Ragdale] Foundation, Central European University, Under the Volcano, the ]Fondo] ]Nacional] ]para] ]la] ]Cultura] ]y] ]las] ]Artes and the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales.] Learn more at her multimedia literature website, www.poetronica.net. The North American Free Translation Agreement/No America Fraught Translation Argument (NAFTA), ratified in 2019, currently consists of three poets writing from the occupied territories of Canada, Mexico, and the United States: Whitney Celeste DeVos, Zane Koss, and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz. Together, they are the translators of Hugo García Manríquez's COMMONPLACE / Lo Común (Cardboard House, 2022) and José Antonio Emmanuel's La Anarquía explicada a los niños (Triangle Square, 2025). Their collaborative translations of Jesús Arellano Meléndrez's "poelectrons" have also appeared in Denver Quarterly.
Review :
String Theory gripped me from start to finish: I surfaced, gasping. In this book-length poem in fragments, Villeda invents an investigative poetics. It is not an attempt at resurrection, no, but a lyric diary that spins around an absence, a mystery, a haunting, an attempt "to reap my unname in the bone marrow," even as it remains impossible to discern whether the author's namesake took her own life or lost it to violence within a context of femicides. String Theory possesses the candor, captivating musicality, and willingness to gaze into the darkness of Alejandra Pizarnik, Isabel Zapata, Sara Uribe, Diana del Angel, Dolores Dorantes. Much praise to NAFTA for conjuring an astonishing version of this book in English, with propulsive syntax and searing diction that manages, magically, to resonate with the melody of the Spanish.-Rachel Galvin, author of Uterotopia
One step forward, one back, Karen Villeda braids poem-structures that string her readers along, pick us up, let us spin, poke at our stitches, rope us in, knot us, and won't release us. With relentless meticulousness, her String Theory disentangles the present-absence of a woman, the sister of a parent, a life extinguished before Villeda was able to speak and understand. Yet she bears her name. We witness the poet's testimony to this absence, to a nothing, an un-thing, thought and thinking, until it is truly something. Something testy, testing, tessellating, that refuses to rest in mere testimonial. Someone. And the translation is magnificent: solemn, intimate, it follows each stitch closely, each rhythm, each chord and umbilical cord, each tensed condensation of sorrow and defiance. A triumph of a book!-Erín Moure, author of Theophylline: A Poetic Migration
Karen Villeda's String Theory is at once a meditation on death and a performance of language as "a body that erases itself." With its long lists and its flows and bursts of prose, it propels process poetics through the exhaustion of the conceptual and toward a confrontation with "the digression of a person" that feels oddly hopeful in our necropolitical moment. In conversation with María Zambrano, Villeda refuses to disentangle philosophy from poetry, instead summoning dark forces and recasting knowledge as a "bilocation of the senses." NAFTA's translation vividly renders the tautness of Villeda's syntax of absence without surrendering its otherworldly thrum.-Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal: Poems
