
Poetry by Karen Villeda
Review by Vicent Moreno
When Teoría de cuerdas (String Theory) by Karen Villeda was first published in Spanish, it solidified her reputation as one of the most intriguing poetic voices in contemporary Mexican literature. The book won the prestigious Premio Nacional de Literatura Gilberto Owen in 2018 in her native Mexico, an award that recognized its innovative approach to poetry and its ability to navigate deeply personal yet universally resonant themes. Now, thanks to Cardboard House Press, this remarkable work is available in a bilingual edition, making it accessible to an English-speaking audience.
At its core, String Theory is an investigation into the suicide of Villeda’s aunt—who shared her name, Karen—and the ways in which trauma is transmitted across generations. While the book’s title references the scientific theory suggesting that the universe is composed of vibrating strings, its emotional core is deeply personal, intertwining physics, memory, and a poetic reckoning with grief. The polysemic “cuerdas” (string, rope, cord) acts as a structural, symbolic, and thematic axis: it is the string that ties family histories together, the metaphorical thread of memory that resists forgetting, the lifeline that both sustains and strangles, and the vibrating force that suggests a multiplicity of possible realities, the what ifs that the poetic voice explores. But it is also, chillingly and prosaically, the method by which the aunt took her own life: “They say she killed herself with a rope.” (67) This tension between abstraction and brutal finality, between metaphor and facts runs through the book.
“You will base all your actions on the melancholic’, they told her when they read her palm.” (33)
This declaration, found toward the beginning of the book, embodies the fatalistic weight of melancholia, and perhaps the driving force behind Villeda’s text, a force that is not merely experienced but imposed, almost as if preordained, unavoidable. In his seminal Mourning and Melancholia, Freud distinguishes between mourning, in which the bereaved eventually detaches from the lost object, and melancholia, where the loss is incorporated into the self, leading to an identity crisis and self-reproach. Villeda’s work is deeply embedded in this second state. The boundaries between self and other blur: the aunt’s absence becomes entangled with the poet’s own subjectivity. The act of bearing the same name as the deceased intensifies this collapse of identity—does the poet speak for herself, or does the voice belong to the lost Karen? Can she avoid the same fate?
The book is haunted by the aunt’s absence, but also by the mystery surrounding her death. “To think you are a stump. / To think objects can’t reach you” (69). These lines echo the fragmentation of a self that has inherited not just grief, but a void—something missing that cannot be located or explained. The aunt’s death is not narrated, only referenced, and the lack of narrative clarity mirrors the emotional disorientation of the speaker. There is no definitive version of what happened, only the debris left behind: silence, speculation, a name shared between the living and the dead. What emerges is not a forensic reconstruction but a poetic haunting, where the absence speaks louder than any fact, and where language—like grief—returns in broken, circling fragments. Unlike traditional elegiac poetry, the poetic voice does not seek closure. Instead, it explores how loss reverberates across time, much like strings in theoretical physics that suggest multiple versions of reality. This idea resonates with the way melancholia functions in Freud’s theory: the melancholic is unable to let go of the lost object, living in a fragmented reality where the past is never truly past. “To be what I have loved and lost / So something or someone, by a geometrical principle, / is a never ending string” (103), laments the poetic voice at one point, in a gesture that points toward the inescapable circularity of grief and suggesting that it is infinite, looping back on itself in an unbroken cycle. The recursive nature of loss becomes a structural principle in the book where repetitions, echoes, and fragmented phrases reinforce the sense of a mind trapped in its own orbit of sorrow.
Villeda does not rely on conventional poetic structures; rather, she embraces a hybrid form that merges poetry, prose fragments, and scientific allusions. Linguistically, the book leans into repetition and negation, mirroring the obsessive return of the melancholic mind to the site of its wound. Phrases loop back on themselves, creating a sense of unease and unresolved grief. The fragmented structure also reflects the disjointed nature of memory, how trauma is never linear but emerges in flashes, in echoes, in what is left unsaid. In this respect, one must praise the translation by NAFTA, which captures these intricacies with precision, maintaining the tension between lyricism and conceptual complexity.
Teoría de cuerdas/String Theory is a work that defies easy categorization. It is a poem-narrative, an elegy, a theoretical meditation, and an experiment in linguistic physics. Like all good poetry books, Villeda’s texts will awaken different feelings and interpretations, depending on their own experiences with loss, identity, and memory. By intertwining personal loss with speculative possibilities, this is a book that stretches across dimensions, connecting past, present, and alternate realities. Villeda’s ability to weave these threads together makes the book an intimate yet expansive work, one that lingers long after reading and reverberates across emotional and intellectual registers.
Teoría de cuerdas/String Theory is available now from Cardboard House Press.
Vicent Moreno is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Arkansas State University. In his research, he is interested in current understandings of literature and its place as a social and cultural referent in our contemporary world.