A Tradition of Rupture

A TRADITION OF RUPTURE
Alejandra Pizarnik
Translated by Cole Heinowitz
ESSAY | $18
December 2019

UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE
Since the publication of her 1955 debut poetry collection, 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 Cortázar to Roberto Bolaño and Raúl 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.