Coral Bracho (Mexico) 1951

Coral Bracho (Mexico)

1951

Poet Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951.

    Her first book of poetry, Peces de piel fugaz (Fish of Fleeting Skin) was published in 1977. Commenting on one of its poems, “Agua de bordes lúbricos,” Bracho noted in 2005 that she tried “to get close to the movement of water,” with images that are “fleeting; you can’t grasp them, they are very fluid. What remains is that continuity of water.”

 

   Her second book of poetry, El ser que va a morir (This Being That Is Going to Die), won the prestigious El Premio Nacional de Poesia de Casa de la Cultra de Aguascalientes (Aguacalientes National Poetry Prize).

    Although some of her later collections were more autobiographical, Bracho’s work, extending from influences as far flung as Luis de Góngora to the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima, centers on what critics have described as her “verbal luxuriance,” an often dark and abstract complexity of language.

     After publishing several further books of poetry, she received the Xavier Villauurtia Prize in 2004. Today she is recognized as one of the major Mexican authors.

    Her work has been translated into English by Forrest Gander in two books to date: Of Their Eyes as Crystalline Sand (1999) and Firefly Under the Tongue (2008).

BOOKS OF POETRY

Peces de piel fugaz (1977; reissued as Huellas de Luz, 1994); El ser que va a morir (México, D.F.: J. Mortiz, 1982); Bajo de destello liguido (1988); Tierra de entraña ardiente (with art by Irma Palacios) (1992); La voluntad del ámbar (México, D.F.: Era, 1998); Esse espacio, ese jardín (México, D.F.: Era, 2003); Cuarto de hotel (México, D.F.: Era, 2007); Si ríe el emperador (México, D.F.: Era, 2010).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

selection in Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1993); Of Their Eyes as Crysalline Sand, trans. by Forrest Gander (Sausalito, California, 1999); Watersilks (Poetry Ireland, 1999); selection in Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2002); selection in Líneas Contectadus: nueva poesía de lost Estados Unidos (Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico), ed. by Luis Cortes Bargallo and Forrest Gander (Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande Books, 2006); Firefly Under the Tongue, trans. by Forrest Gander (New York: New Directions, 2008); It Must Be a Misunderstanding, trans. by Forrest Gander (New York: New Directions, 2022)

 
For a selection of poems in English, click here:
http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poets/coral_bracho