[Brooklyn, NY]

Alejandra Pizarnik Launch
February 29, 2020, 7:00 pm
at Wendy's Subway

Please join us in celebrating A Tradition of Rupture by Alejandra Pizarnik (UDP, 2019)—the first English-language collection of the legendary Argentine poet’s critical writings.

Cole Heinowitz, editor and translator, will read from and talk about Pizarnik’s work.

Editors Barbara Epler (New Directions) & Silvina López Medin (Ugly Duckling Presse) will join Heinowitz in conversation, and for a Q&A with the audience moderated by Rachel Valinsky and Matvei Yankelevich.

A reception and book sales at a discount will follow.

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.

This event is organized in collaboration with Wendy’s Subway, as part of The Quick and the Dead—a yearlong, multi-phase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its second year, the program focuses on Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972), situating her work within the broader context of contemporary Latin American literature and translation. Over the course of six months, Wendy’s Subway will offer a variety of public programs including a reading group focused the writing of Pizarnik and her contemporaries, and a series of workshops on literary translation. The Quick and the Dead seeks to mobilize the creative and pedagogical potential of focused engagement with a single author through sustained reflection across a variety of public events and opportunities for cross-disciplinary encounters.

Facebook event here.