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 unearths this extraordinary poet for English readers in a bilingual edition that spans the heights of Pizarnik s oeuvre. In her brief life, Pizarnik produced an astonishingly powerful body of work. 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. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness, and death, Pizarnik explores the shifting valences of the self and the vague border between speech and silence. This compilation of poems includes the full collections of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse."

The Galloping Hour: French Poems-never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime-gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960-1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970-1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik's deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy. Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors-Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud-this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik's work led Raul Zurita to note: "Her poetry-with a clarity that becomes piercing-illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity."

"An aura of legendary prestige surrounds the work of Alejandra Pizarnik," writes Cesar Aira. Her last collection to be published before her suicide in 1972, A Musical Hell is the first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S. Pizarnik writes at the edge of poetic impossibility, opening with a blues singer, expanding into silence, and closing into a theater of shadows and songs of the drowned."

The second set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series, which includes Vale Ave by H. D.; Eiko & Koma by Forrest Gander; A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik; The Beautiful Contradictions by Nathaniel Tarn.