“The Best of 2020,” Heriberto Yépez, in Mileno (translation):

A decade has gone by. The question is: in 2020, who will be viewed as the most forward-thinking? Not even in the United States do they know the answer yet. But I will tell you: Christine Wertheim. She lives in Los Angeles. She has one book: +|‘me’S-pace (2007). She fusions concretism and psychohistory. It would seem like feminism or conceptualism, but it surpasses such etiquettes. Her work is not literary or aesthetic; she utilizes poetic resources, but what she does is create an accidental science, an erratic. According to her theory – named litteral poetics – the English language possesses clues – like other languages – that describe (between the lines) the crypto-social structure…She argues that Western literature is One’s song that originates from the mother’s pee-stream. Hers is a pataphysic of psychoanalysis. Wertheim challenges, then, dogmas shared by mainstream literature and American experimental writing. She does not believe in the arbitrary character of the sign – so long, semiotics and (post)structuralism – and she asks for a (nefarious) return of psychoanalysis (meaning “son-analysis”), which has been practically expelled today due to romantic-expressionistic resonances, after the Death of the Author and deconstruction. She analyzes Joyce and Beckett in an intrepid manner, offering evidence of how the English language is originated when the masculine figure – son(g) – wishes to separate himself from the “mother,” – which is to say, from the “M-(any)-Others.” To be a Hero: chew Eros.

A text is composed of all the relations between the encrypted characters. And the characters and verbs are spelled in the words; they have to be found. Those verbo-voco-visual pieces dis-cover that the Western writer is not a parricide – as we thought – but the ruse of a matricide martyr. Just imagine that the visual poetry of Cabrera Infante would look to prove (systematically and seriously) that Fidel castrated every Cuban. And imagine Derrida playing with a Ouija board until discovering that he’s Freud’s mother’s medium. This vacant-vociferation is what Wertheim is exploring in the English language today. She is the first writing of the new millennium.