A Tradition of Rupture

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Cole Heinowitz. Since the publication of her 1955 debut poetry collection, La tierra m s ajena (THE MOST FOREIGN COUNTRY), Alejandra Pizarnik has captivated the imaginations of many of Latin America's most celebrated twentieth-century writers, from Octavio Paz and Julio Cort zar to Roberto Bola o and Ra l Zurita. Over the last several years, the majority of Pizarnik's poetry has been translated into English, garnering enormous acclaim in the U.S. and abroad, yet her extraordinary critical writings--including commentaries on figures such as Artaud, Borges, Breton, Michaux, and Pessoa, as well as intimate accounts of her own working methods--remain almost entirely unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. A TRADITION OF RUPTURE makes these writings available to English-speaking readers for the first time, offering indispensable insight into the range of Pizarnik's reading and the principle influences on her poetics. The works collected in this volume also provide a rare glimpse of the famously introverted poet in her capacity as public intellectual and critic, revealing a voracious intelligence turned outward toward the world in vital dialogue with the words of others.

"For many years now we have known Alejandra Pizarnik as a poet who explored the mysteries of pain & mental suffering in a mode & at a level like that, say, of Kafka, & still more that of Artaud. What her translator Cole Heinowitz now brings us so forcefully is a sampling of Pizarnik's poetics & critical writings, as a further & necessary record of what it means to claim a life through poetry. Simultaneously subversive & tragic, hers is a full-blown work that cries for our attention."--Jerome Rothenberg