In recent years Pizarnik has come to be widely acknowledged as a key figure within Argentinian literature. Born Flora Alejandra Pizarnik in 1936 in a Jewish immigrant district of Buenos Aires, Pizarnik rapidly evolved a distinctive poetic persona, the ‘personaje alejandrino’ (Correspondencia, p. 53). This poetic self fed off her intense and eclectic reading which spanned Golden Age Spanish poetry, poètes maudits such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, surrealism, and the tortured worlds of Artaud and Kafka. The result was an accentuation of her latent feelings of estrangement, both from her immediate social environment and ultimately from language itself. In her short lifetime (ended by a fatal overdose in 1972) she published eight collections of poetry, as well as numerous uncollected poems and a significant number of reviews in literary magazines.

Her first poetry collection was the adolescent La tierra más ajena (1955), which parades self-consciously modern urban references, for example to ‘la ventanilla tranviaria’ (Poesía, p. 29) or to the ‘puerto de colores impresionistas’ (p. 32). The latter phrase calls to mind Benito Quinquela Martín's popular paintings of the port area close to where Pizarnik grew up. More specific allusions to visual art would feature in later poetry, for example poems 24–6 of Árbol de Diana are prefaced by the phrases ‘un dibujo de Wols’, ‘exposición Goya’, and ‘un dibujo de Klee’ (Poesía, pp. 126–8), and there are references to Hieronymus Bosch, Marc Chagall, Odilon Redon and others. However, whilst her references to artists become more concrete, the poetic images associated with these artists become much less obvious. Pizarnik eventually disowned this early collection, but some poems from it are worth considering, such as ‘Vagar en lo opaco’ (Poesía, p. 18), which focuses solipsistically on her eyes, or ‘Yo soy’ (p. 30), which attempts to define the self as a kind of seer. These examples anticipate the inward-looking direction that her poetry would subsequently take.