A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik (New Directions)
An aura of legendary prestige surrounds the work of Alejandra Pizarnik, writes Cesar 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.