By Hana Zittel Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, Translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker (2025) Cristina Rivera Garza doesn’t run for exercise. She runs for the mental challenge and the pure pleasure of reaching the euphoric state of endorphin release. When she runs, it’s not on the streets or in parks, but in the alleys of the city, where danger is elevated and the unusual occurs. During a run, she stumbles upon a dead body, the first time this has happened. The man is the victim of a brutal murder, castrated and left in the alley accompanied by a block of text sprawled on a brick wall nearby written in nail polish. When a detective interviews her for the investigation, she questions Rivera Garza about the text. As a writer and professor she recognizes the words as the work of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. As more castrated and murdered men start to show up around the city with Pizarnik’s words as a calling card, the detective and Garza become more intertwined. Though Garza includes herself as one of the main characters, Death Takes Me is a work of fiction, and one that rejects the conformity of genre or literary expectations. At its root a mystery tale that inverts gendered violence, this novel ventures into sections with varied viewpoints and dips into the diary of Pizarnik, creating a unique amalgam of story forms and pacing. Living in Mexico, Garza was constantly confronted with news of murdered women inspiring the violence in Death Takes Me, focusing on men as victims instead. In a NPR interview, Garza states, “We live in societies that have high tolerance for the suffering of women and that has invited the perpetration of violence against women. To me, it was really important to swap these places to see that even though in Spanish the word victim is always feminine — it’s La Victima. So what do we do when we are faced with this violence that is perpetrated specifically against men for sexual reasons?” Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me is crafty, subversive and a masterful work that serves as a worthy follow up to the 2023 English language release of her Publisher Prize winning memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer. The Most Foreign Country by Alejandra Pizarnik, Translated by Yvette Siegert (2017) and time strangulated my star but its essence will go on existing in my atemporal interior shine, oh essence of my star! Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s first collection of poetry was published in 1955, when the writer was just 19 years old. This collection, La tierra más ajena, in the original Spanish, was only released in English in 2017 translated by Yvette Siegert and released by Ugly Duckling Presse. A collection that serves as a youthful introduction to the renowned, surrealist poet, The Most Foreign Country provides a glimpse into Pizarnik’s evolving writing. In these poems, she dwells on love and writing and plays with abstract metaphors. Her obsession with poetry, prose and carefully chosen words ring through these early poems, which uphold the intensity of her later work. Pizarnik went on to receive both a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellowship, publishing more poetry collections, among other styles of writing. She worked as a translator, magazine writer and literary critic, living in both Paris and Buenos Aires. In 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik took her own life at age 36. The power of her work continues to outlive her with a complete collection of her diaries set to be released in Spanish in spring 2025. No. 136
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