The Galloping Hour: French Poems

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The Galloping Hour: French Poems―never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime―gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolan~o) wrote in French.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 Rau´l 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.”