Description

Cardboard House Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 4, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Karen Villeda’s String Theory is a long autobiographical poem that explores and interrogates the act of suicide from an intimate perspective. The poem grapples with the anguish, fear, and melancholia that pushes someone to end their life as it traces the echoes and ripples that the act leaves on those close to the deceased in their ongoing attempts to understand the event. String Theory addresses the ineffability of death via an obstinate language that ends up affirming life: “How to materialize a death? | How to say no to a dead woman? But yes.” Villeda strips language to its most naked, aiming to probe what her first mentor, Mexican poet Elsa Cross, describes as “the true test of a poem.” String Theory won the Gilberto Owen National Literature Award in Mexico in 2018.