full length literary translations

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!

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Erín Moure, author of Theophylline: A Poetic Migration

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​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