String Theory / Teoría de Cuerdas

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.