Selected Poems

Overview: Alejandra Pizarnik is a hugely significant literary figure, an iconoclastic poet who carved her own sparse language of paradox and despair from the collective unconscious of Western mythology and the dreamscapes of her own multiple selves. Her work probes the legacy of major writers from Kafka to Rimbaud, Lautréamont and other poets maudits, and in its own passionate complexity resonates with the great twentieth-century artistic and intellectual movements of Surrealism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. To date, however, though relatively well-known in the English-speaking world, her poetry has not been translated comprehensively into English. This substantial volume of her Selected Poems, translated by the award- winning Cecilia Rossi, rectifies, at last, this unconscionable lack.