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This essay explores Mexican poet Dolores Dorantes's long poem Estilo (2011), which draws on Dorantes's background as an investigative journalist to address the feminicides that have plagued Ciudad Juárez since the 1990s. And yet, the poem questions what poetry can register that reporting cannot. This essay argues that the feminist politics of Estilo dictate its haunting formal experiments—first and foremost, Dorantes's transformation of a lyric speaker into a collective voice that claims a perverse agency in the face of extreme gendered, classed, and racialized violence. Further, I argue that to fully address the transfeminist politics of the poem (a term I draw from Sayak Valencia), we must look to its translation and circulation as the border-crossing Estilo/Style, translated by Jen Hofer and published by the US small press Kenning Editions, which takes up the hemispheric construction of violence against women with a special fervor.
