Firefly Under the Tongue
/ poems of Coral Bracho
/ Finalist, PEN Translation Award Citation by Judge Lawrence Venuti
“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.”
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Reviews
Reviewed at Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry & Opinion
Reviewed in Boston Review
Reviewed in Calyx
Reviewed in MultiCultural Review
Reviewed in Literature & Arts of the Americas
Reviewed at The Asheville Poetry Review
Reviewed at The Nation
Reviewed for The Village Voice
“Her work has altered the landscape of Mexican poetry in a way that is comparable to John Ashbery’s in the U.S. ”
“Coral’s work is so idiosyncratic, it’s hard to emulate.”
“A Mexican writer who is becoming internationally known.”
“These poems are incandescent, submerged, sensate, intelligent in the way the universe is intelligent, at once cosmic and intimate. Coral Bracho creates a space so charmed and charged I never wanted to leave it.”