Awards
2017 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry
Staff Pick
Collecting 10 years of poetry from her brief life, Extracting the Stone of Madness is the most comprehensive selection of Alejandra Pizarnik's work currently available in English translation. Featuring the Argentine poet's final three collections, this bilingual edition also includes uncollected poems and three posthumously published entries.
Recipient of both a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright scholarship, Pizarnik's life was tragically short — ending with an intentional barbiturate overdose at the age of 36. Also a translator, playwright, and essayist, Pizarnik, over the past few years (thanks to publications by New Directions and Ugly Duckling), seems to be garnering some much-deserved attention in the Anglophone world.
Extracting the Stone of Madness offers Pizarnik's poetry in all of its dark beauty and emotional fragility. Exploring dwelling on themes of absence, death, silence, sadness, oblivion, loss, solitude, vulnerability, longing, fear, mystery, and madness, Pizarnik's life was evidently one of great suffering. Nonetheless, the art she created as a result, while often morose or dour, still blazes with a rarefied brilliance. Revered by the likes of Paz, Cortázar, Calvino, Aira, and Vila-Matas, Pizarnik isn't to be overlooked. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America's most significant twentieth-century poets.
Revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness 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 Lautréamont,” and to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s "physical and moral suffering."
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 Boston Review
Review
"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
Review
"To bear down on Pizarnik’s scant lines is to find their essential rigor: nothing is brittle, nothing breaks." Joshua Cohen, Harper's
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"Pizarnik's poems flare up like deep, bright flames." Publishers Weekly
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"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 Argentina Independent
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"Each of Pizarnik's poems is the cube of an enormous wheel." Julio Cortázar
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"There is an aura of almost legendary prestige that surrounds the life and work of Alejandra Pizarnik." César Aira
Synopsis
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 Lautr amont," as well as to the "unparalleled intensity" of Artaud's "physical and moral suffering."
About the Author
One of the most significant contributors to twentieth-century Argentine poetry, Alejandra Pizarnik made a name for herself through her dark themes and diction. Heavily influenced by Rimbaud and Artaud, Pizarnik believed that suffering was intrinsic to the creation of great poetry. This concession to misery was apparent in her work as her writing was often filled with themes of solitude, estrangement, madness, and death — yet also included moments of tenderness. During her short lifetime she wrote seven books of poetry and one book of prose, as well as numerous translations, short stories, essays, and drawings. In 1968 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and later in 1971 she received a Fulbright Scholarship. Pizarnik struggled with depression and ended her life in 1972.
Yvette Siegert is a poet and translator based in New York. She has edited for The New Yorker and has taught at Columbia University, Baruch College and the 92nd Street Y. Her writing has appeared in many publications, most recently in Aufgabe, Boston Review, St. Petersburg Review, Stonecutter, The Literary Review and newyorker.com, and her work has received recognition from PEN/New York State Council on the Arts, the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts.