Book Review: Cardboard House Press Releases Karen Villeda’s Collection, String Theory
Translated from Spanish, String Theory is a long autobiographical poem about the suicide —by hanging– of Karen Villeda’s aunt of the same name. Published by Cardboard House Press in March 2024, the collection delves into themes like attachment, identity, connotations of suicide, femininity, and sexism.
The title of the book alone invokes in large ideas of identity and attachment that flow from poem to poem. Villeda feels a sense of attachment to her aunt because they share the same name, and because of this, Villeda is haunted by Karen, like she is “hanging from” her. Villeda is lost in her sense of self and feels shame in being associated with Karen, due to how she is viewed by the rest of the family. However, she also expresses the need for Karen to be seen and remembered for the woman she was, and not just defined by her suicide.
Villeda maintains an ambiguous stream-of-consciousness voice in her language, using many sentence fragments and repeated phrases like “something or someone”: “Something or someone that shields itself”. Throughout the entire book Villeda associates Karen as both a “something” or a “someone,” unsure of how to think of her. She reflects on how her perception of Karen is affected by that of her family. I took the “something” to refer to the suicide, as well as how Karen is characterized by the rest of the family– due to her suicide, she has become a controversial topic and is not spoken of. The speaker’s family looks down on suicide and associates it with shame: “A death that shouldn’t have been. An absurd death. A very strange death”.
The “something” could also refer to the dehumanization of Karen by her family– not just because of her choice of death, but due to her gender as well. In Part II, Villeda breaks down connotations of suicide by a woman, suggesting that the woman must be weak, unstable, and fragile: “Weak women have done it. It needs humility not pride.” Her suicide is dismissed by the family, as they condescendingly refer to her as “the dead little girl.”
There are longer prose moments in the book where Villeda interprets Karen’s own discouraged feelings toward her life, bringing in ideas of sexism. One piece from Part I focuses on an old journal entry of Karen’s from August 19, 1980. Here Karen names her many fears: "Fear of not being allowed to read in public. Fear of being left motherless. Fear of feeling such hatred for my father…Fear of kissing a girl.” Here, Karen is finally brought to life as someone, and not just defined by family assumptions. She was bold, innovative, and in love, but felt ostracized by the world for being “different.” This piece makes us wonder if Karen’s suicide was really a sort of femicide onto herself, if she felt she had failed to be the woman she was expected to be. The family’s feelings toward Karen after her death are all the more heartbreaking with this context.
An important concept Villeda emphasizes is that of distance, both the emotional distance she feels from her aunt and the tangible distance she wishes to put between them to become detached from Karen’s controversy. Distance is introduced from the very first poem: “Bring the rope closer // to something or to the distance of something, // that something and the distance of someone.” This idea of distance flows through the book and comes full circle in the very last poem, but this time with acceptance: “I am something or the distance from that rope. I am something or the distance from her. I am there. I am her”. Villeda now accepts her attachment to Karen and embraces it. Villeda rehumanizes Karen along with her struggle– she transforms her aunt’s “weakness” into the strength of femininity.
The collection closes with the return of attachment and identity themes, as Villeda makes statements about how her family’s detachment from Karen strengthens Villeda’s attachment to her. In the last poem she writes, “They gave her a name, wait a distance. It doesn’t exist. Here it is. Here she is”. Villeda’s family attempts to distance themselves from Karen by giving her name to Villeda, so the name will be associated with someone else. However, Villeda knows that nothing will ever distance them from her aunt– nothing will make her disappear. With Karen’s name, Villeda feels a stronger sense of attachment to her, and I was left with the feeling that she has come to realize she can bring Karen back to life within herself.
Karen’s death does not mean Villeda’s identity is gone. Throughout the book echoes a lost voice, searching for an authentic identity unassociated with her aunt. However, this resistance was a result of Villeda associating herself with the parts of Karen that her family looked down upon– the reasons why Karen is figuratively dead to them. Towards the end of the book Villeda gains more awareness of her choice to let this image of her aunt overtake her identity, and resists it– “Something or someone is what allows her to define you”. Throughout the book there is a heavy voice of shame at being associated with Karen through the same name, but Villeda ends the book with a voice of pride. She resists the family’s connotations of a woman’s suicide as stupid and weak– she knows her aunt was a powerful woman with great love in her heart, even when no one else saw it.
The conflict between the “something or someone” escalates toward the final poems, this time with a voice of more emotion and acceptance: “Something or someone // and what you’re facing is gnawing at you”. The themes of sexism and femininity return with the mention of Karen’s family changing the narrative of her challenging life to “the story of a lost woman”. Karen had lived a life of criticism for her boldness and sexuality, traits that resist traditional gender conformities. Even when she continued to express herself authentically, no one in her life could accept the idea of boldness in femininity. When Karen had enough, she “makes herself little” and commits suicide.
The association of Karen as a something relates to sexist connotations of suicide as cowardly, but when Villeda humanizes her, the suicide is transformed into an act of boldness and courage. Whether she knew it or not, Karen was testing sexist suicide connotations through her death, and killed herself aggressively and graphically. She did everything but make herself little. Karen wanted to be accepted as the woman she was, but she was not and her suicide only led her to be dehumanized.
There is a profound irony in this collection, as the negative reactions toward Karen’s death happened to be a large part of what killed her. When the book comes to a close, we are able to see and respect Karen as a powerful woman who was pushed to her limit. String Theory calls to all women who feel weak within themselves and encourages them to resist gender conformities and shamelessly express their individual femininity.
Maya Olivo is a Mexican-Puerto Rican writer who sees poetry in everything around her. Her poems have appeared in Love & Squalor, Synthesis Publications, and Unmuted: The Girls Write Now 2021 Anthology. Previously she was awarded a Gold Key and Silver Medal in Novel Writing by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College and a proud native New Yorker raised in East Harlem.
