Book record
Extracting the Stones of Madness
Alejandra Pizarnik
Translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert
Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stones of Madness, translated by Yvette Siegert, is one of the essential English-language portals into Pizarnik’s work. The title captures the strange physicality of her poems: madness is not an abstraction but something lodged in the body, something that might be removed, studied, held, or made to shine. Pizarnik’s lyric world is built from silence, childhood, death, mirrors, voices, and the unbearable pressure of self-recognition. Siegert’s translation gives those materials a sharp, spectral English. I would not read this book for comfort, exactly, though it may become comforting in the way a precise wound can be. It gives readers permission to ask questions about the self that ordinary language usually hurries past.
- Publisher
- New Directions
- Language
- Spanish
- Country
- Argentina