Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972 [Paperback]

Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S.Pizarnik reveals an ecstasy in the instability of language and draws from it a mercurial, pathetic truth.In compressed fragments, stark monostichs, and dense prose poems, thelate Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarniks oeuvre presents a rich innerworld built from a litany of symbols.I...was blown away by the thoughtful interiorityby turns delicate and brutalof 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 spacenot so large, but also interminably vastbetween the workings of the mind and those of the natural world.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. On the page she carves out spaces of solitude and silence in which language is reduced to its very essence... There is an aura of almost legendary prestige that surrounds the life and work of Alejandra?PizarnikTo 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.Each of Pizarnik's poems is the cube of an enormous?wheel.Read Alejandra Pizarnik's poems. They're remarkable.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.Brilliant, taut poems.Pizarnik's poems flare up like deep, bright flames.ThilÓ*