The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America’s most significant twentieth-century poets.
Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to "the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”
Publishers Weekly
10/19/2015
First the first time, Argentine poet Pizarnik’s harrowing, decade-spanning opus can be read in an English translation, in this hefty dual-language edition. The chronologically organized collection—which includes her books Works and Nights (1965), Extracting the Stone of Madness (1968), A Musical Hell (1971), and a series of posthumously published poems that led up to her 1972 suicide at age 36—serves as a journey toward the labyrinthine depths of depression. “It closes in on me,” she writes of death in one of her later pieces, “it is my only horizon.” Pizarnik’s poems flare up like deep, bright flames, and they put into stark relief the vivid descriptions of lilacs, shadows, masks, silence, and multiple selves to which she obsessively returns. The poem is a lifeline for her: “I redo the body of my poem like someone who tries to cure her own wound.” Yet the deeper she searches for a remedy through language, the more limiting and disorienting the language becomes: “who is speaking in this room full of eyes? Who gnaws with a mouth made of paper? Names that come up, shadows with masks. Cure me of this void, I said.” Pizarnik’s anguish is palpable and mirrors the intense blaze of her all-too-brief life. (Oct.)
Booklist
This overdue bilingual edition showcases the exquisite range of her short career…Pizarnik's brilliant, otherworldy voice will resonate for generations.
Flavorwire
Brilliant, taut poems.
Julio Cortázar
Each of Pizarnik's poems is the cube of an enormouswheel.
Enrique Vila-Matas
To the allure Pizarnik has, as a figure wrapped in mystery and an inexplicable personality, must be added the fact that, word by word, she “wrote the night,” and the reader who takes an interest in her will discover that this nocturnal writing, which had a great sense of risk, was born of the purest necessity, something seen in very few 20th-century writers: an extreme lyric and a tragedy.
Los Angeles Review of Books
Pizarnik reveals an ecstasy in the instability of language and draws from it a mercurial, pathetic truth.
César Aira
There is an aura of almost legendary prestige that surrounds the life and work of AlejandraPizarnik
The Boston Review
The darkly beautiful poems of the great Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik generate an immersive, Gothic atmosphere in which art is both violence and respite, contamination and antidote, hell and paradise.
The Argentina Independent
Pizarnik made a huge impact on Spanish-language poetry, taking it down to its darkest depths and abandoning it there, leaving one of the most fascinating legacies in Argentine literature.
The Poetry Foundation
Read Alejandra Pizarnik's poems. They're remarkable.
Joshua Cohen - Harper's
To bear down on Pizarnik’s scant lines is to find their essential rigor: nothing is brittle, nothing breaks.
Jane Yong Kim - The Atlantic
I...was blown away by the thoughtful interiority—by turns delicate and brutal—of this Argentine poet, who died of an intentional drug overdose at the age of 36. The poems in this new collection, translated by Yvette Siegert and published earlier this year, show a preoccupation with the space—not so large, but also interminably vast—between the workings of the mind and those of the natural world.
Scout Poetry
In compressed fragments, stark monostichs, and dense prose poems, the late Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s oeuvre presents a rich inner world built from a litany of symbols.
Matthew Phipps - The Millions
"On the page she carves out spaces of solitude and silence in which language is reduced to its very essence..."
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