NEWS & EVENTS • NEW TITLES • CATALOG • ABOUT US • CONTACT • PROFESSORS • LINKS • NEWSLETTER

Firefly Under the Tongue, by Coral Bracho

Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander

A brilliantly translated bilingual edition of poems by one of Mexico's foremost woman poets.

Born in 1951 in Mexico City, Coral Bracho has published half a dozen books of poems including the groundbreaking El ser que va a morir (1982) which changed the course of Mexican poetry. Her exquisite long-lined poems evoke the sensual realm where logic is disbanded, wonder evoked. In the words of her translator Forrest Gander, "Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound.... Bracho's poems make sense first as music, and music propels them."

From her early collections--Bajo el destello liguido and El ser--to her most recent books La voluntad del ambar and Ese espacio, ese jardin (which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize), Firefly under the Tongue offers the first book of English translations by this most important and influential living poet

Coral Bracho is the author of six books of poems including Tierra de entrana ardiente, in which she collaborated with the painter Irma Palacios. Among her grants and prizes are the Aguacalientes National Poetry Prize in 1981 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, The Nation, and Poetry International. Forrest Gander's translations include Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems by Jaime Saenz (with Kent Johnson) (University of California, 2002); No Shelter: Selected Poems by Pura Lopez Colome (Graywolf, 2002); and The Night: A Poem by Jaime Saenz (with Kent Johnson) (Princeton, 2007). He directs the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University where he also teaches literature.