In her portrayal of an alienated poetic persona—a portrayal which is to be found in nearly every one of her poems—Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972)1 resorts with striking frequency to the image of the exile or expatriate. And in doing so, she joins a good number of poets who, from Romanticism onwards, have seen in the figure of the exile an emblem for the artist's alienation from self and society. She joins them, however, in a restricted fashion, since her poetry can in no way be considered to speak with a collective voice. For Pizarnik the figure of the exile has the narrowest of significations, functioning largely as a personal metaphor, as one more image within a poetic corpus devoted—with a relentless and mesmerizing beauty—to the circular and narcissistic task of reflecting just a few facets of a single persona. Thus, in the case of Pizarnik, one must think primarily of an internal or ‘poetic’ exile. In her poetry, particularly in the late texts, to be exiled ultimately means to be torn from language it...