Yvette Siegert

“An aura of legendary prestige surrounds the work of Alejandra Pizarnik,” writes César 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.

Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert. In 1962, Pizarnik published her fourth collection, Diana's Tree, the book that would both change and establish her poetic voice, and it contained the slimmest verses the poet would ever write. It also carried a glowing introduction by Octavio Paz, who by that point served as a prominent Mexican diplomat in Paris and had become a leader of the city's expatriate literary circles. Diana'a Tree, wrote Paz, was a feat of alchemical prowess, a work of precocious linguistic transparency that let off "a luminous heat that could burn, smelt or even vaporize its skeptics."