Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

Alejandra Pizarnik

may 2016 · New Directions Publishing

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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 1962–1972 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 Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”

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Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) was born in Argentina and educated in Spanish and Yiddish. In addition to poetry, Pizarnik also wrote experimental works of theater and prose. She died of a deliberate drug overdose at the age of thirty-six.

The poet Yvette Siegert has also translated The Reef by Juan Villoro and Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry collections A Musical Hell, Diana’s Tree, and Extracting the Stone of Madness, for which she won the 2017 Best Translated Book Award.