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Founded in 2014, Cardboard House Press is a space for dialogue between poetics that investigate social, environmental, political, cartographic and linguistic formations. Cardboard House Press publishes poetry in translation in the United States by Latin American and Spanish authors and prints books through diverse processes, including letterpress, block printing, stencil, screenprinting and digital. A series of our publications are made by hand in community workshops. All our books are bilingual.
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String Theory
Teoría de cuerdas
Karen Villeda
Translated from the Spanish by NAFTAKaren 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.
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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
150 pages | 8x8 in
March 4, 2025| ISBN 978-1-945720-34-5
Designed by Mutandis
The publication of this book was made possible in part by grants from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the Poetry Foundation.
Praise
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
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.
Translators
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.
Reviews
“The voice fractures and overlaps, into meditation on death, on suicide, on what it means to be woman, a dead woman, in a world of male violence. Lines chase each other across pages, weaving a knot which lies squarely in the chest of the book: Algo o alguien? Someone or something? Existence only through someone else’s memory. Existence by way of nonexistence.”—Fabiana Lacau, The Whitney Review
So it seems especially poignant and beautiful that here, not a lone translator but rather a team of translators came together around this book in community, to give it a new expression—to respect its ambiguity and hold it up to the “Light and, and, / and light.” (...) the most moving sections are those written in numbered lists—many of which begin in fact, as if trying to write down what is known (“she was found with a tangle of curls between her fingers”), and dissolve into speculation about what the aunt was going through at the time of her death. The translators move nimbly with the poet between forms. NAFTA’s translators also demonstrate that their ears are wonderfully attuned to the musicality of the work, even finding resonances that fit the world of the poem but aren’t directly in the original (...) It’s a good reminder that not all is lost in translation, but rather something is often gained.—Kelsi Vanada, Full Stop
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. (...) 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. (...) 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.(...) 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.—Vicent Moreno, Angel City Review
The poems are massive, the statements flurry and flushed, each flip of the page another step in a journey of existential intensity. Villeda’s work feels like the breath itself, a third person exploration of an autobiographical sequence.(...) As the book unfolds, the reader becomes privy to the aunt’s circumstances: a large, beating heart of a question. That the aunt was found dead, by hanging, is truth. That there is unknown to cause is also truth. There is doubt. There is hope. There is anger. There is impossibility: was the hanging a death by suicide, or was it the result of gender-based violence? (...) String Theory is a book of mourning, it is a book of cherishing, and it is a book of the resulting fury of need, of needing to know, of pushing forward, into what else but what we are yet to have. It is of connections and relations and relationships with ourselves and with others and the living the dead and being alive and being dead. This book props up our shared gaze and angles it across vast distances of knowing. The results may or may not be clear, but the process is filled with power and beauty. It is the poet’s act to remember and renew, alongside us.—Greg Bem, North of Oxford
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