photo by Pinky Bass
Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho Translated by Forrest Gander
“Her work has altered the landscape of Mexican poetry in a way that is comparable to John Ashbery’s in the U.S.” —Poetry
“Coral’s work is so idiosyncratic, it’s hard to emulate.” —José Luis Rivas, Bomb
“It is not dailiness with which her poems concern themselves, but “pure immensity.”
–C.D. Wright
“A Mexican writer who is becoming internationally known.” —Library Journal
“These poems are incandescent, submerged, sensate, intelligent in the way the universe isintelligent, at once cosmic and intimate. Coral Bracho creates a space so charmed andcharged I never wanted to leave it.” --Carole Maso
Bracho & Gander interviewed by Michael Silverblatt for KCRW (radio)
Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published seven books, includingthe groundbreaking El ser que va a morir (1981), which changed the course of Mexican poetry. The prominent Mexican poet David Heurta wrote: “The secret ofCoral Bracho’s poetry, its prodigious originality, can be traced to its tendency to surge like a living voice, a silky impetuous torrent.” Coral Bracho’s poems explorethe sensual realm where logic is disbanded, wonder evoked. Containing poems from her groundbreaking collections in Spanish, Firefly
under the Tongue is the first book in English by this most important and influential living poet.
CORAL BRACHO is the author of eight books of poems including Tierra de entrañaardiente, in which she collaborated with the painter Irma Palacios. Among her
grants and prizes are the Aguascalientes Prize, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry
Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, The Nation, and Poetry International.
Coral Bracho: an Introduction
(click here to read a draft of the introduction)
Reviewed at The Nation
Reviewed for The Village Voice