Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho
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Listen to Bracho & Gander interviewed by Michael Silverblatt for KCRW (radio)
“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
“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
Finalist, PEN Translation Award Citation
“Forrest Gander has redefined our sense of contemporary Mexican poetry with his wide-ranging selection from Coral Bracho’s compelling body of work. At once ferocious and veracious, sensual and surreal, immersed in nature and conscious of imposing a pastoral artifice, Bracho’s writing plays out a string of discontinuous images knotted with neologisms. Gander shrewdly adopts a modernist approach, all clarity and explicitness, mimicking her mannerisms yet inscribing his own suggestive nuances. His versions admit us into her fantastic world by evoking a succession of U.S. poetries-- Whitman, Black Mountain, the New York School-- and thereby casting them in a new light that is strangely beautiful.”
Judge: Lawrence Venuti
