The Galloping Hour
French Poems
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- US$9.99
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- US$9.99
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A beautifully produced and exquisitely translated edition of French poems by “the best exponent of the poetry of introversion and metaphorical delirium” (Italo Calvino)
The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño) wrote in French.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 Raúl 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.”
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The late Argentine writer Pizarnik (Extracting the Stone of Madness) kindles a wildfire of rapturous desire amid a twilight landscape of irrecoverable love in these poems that were unpublished during her brief life. In her waking dreamland, Pizarnik's speaker imagines herself atomized into water, night, silence, and death itself exiled from the corporeal world because she cannot unlearn "how to read what the dust scrawls." Throughout, the speaker oscillates between her imprisonment by emotion and her desire to escape her senses for the sake of sanity. "Drunk and I made love all night, just like a sick dog," Pizarnik writes. Her speaker is constantly drawn into a type of masochism, behaving as both predator and prey to herself ("my words are keys that lock me into a mirror, with you, but ever alone"), and confesses her acceptance of misery, "All night, I know that abandonment is me, that the only moaning voice is me." Demonstrating a deep vulnerability and admirable ability to set limits for her own distress, Pizarnik speaks "of burying everyday fear to secure the fear of an instant" while withholding judgment from others, affirming "to each her own absence." Pizarnik's lyrical journal details an unceasing heartbreak lustful, paralyzing, and contagious.
