Brief Description
The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America s most significant twentieth-century poets.
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Learn More about the Book
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 1972 comprises 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 Lautreamont, as well as to the unparalleled intensity of Artaud s physical and moral suffering. "
About the Author
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936 1972) was a key figure in twentieth-century Argentine poetry.
Review Quotes
1. Each of Pizarnik's poems is the cube of an enormouswheel.--Julio Cortazar"
2. Read Alejandra Pizarnik's poems. They're remarkable.--The Poetry Foundation
3. 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.
4. Brilliant, taut poems.
5. Pizarnik's poems flare up like deep, bright flames.
6. This overdue bilingual edition showcases the exquisite range of her short career Pizarnik's brilliant, otherworldy voice will resonate for generations."
7. To bear down on Pizarnik s scant lines is to find their essential rigor: nothing is brittle, nothing breaks.--Joshua Cohen"
8. Pizarnik reveals an ecstasy in the instability of language and draws from it a mercurial, pathetic truth.
9. 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.
10. 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.--Enrique Vila-Matas"
11. There is an aura of almost legendary prestige that surrounds the life and work of AlejandraPizarnik--Cesar Aira"
