Poetry may be the most immediately sensuous literary form, but its language tends to substitute for touch rather than enact it. To place the body in close relation with other bodies and objects involves an unsettling of the self within a larger passage from identities to intimacies. Coral Bracho stunned readers in Mexico by doing just this in her 1981 collection El ser que va a morir (Being toward Death), parts of which appear in Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, beautifully translated by Forrest Gander.
— Alan Gilbert, the Boston Review
A brilliantly translated bilingual edition of poems by one of Mexico’s foremost 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
Poetry may be the most immediately sensuous literary form, but its language tends to substitute for touch rather than enact it. To place the body in close relation with other bodies and objects involves an unsettling of the self within a larger passage from identities to intimacies. Coral Bracho stunned readers in Mexico by doing just this in her 1981 collection El ser que va a morir (Being toward Death), parts of which appear in Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho, beautifully translated by Forrest Gander.
— Alan Gilbert, the Boston Review
The accomplishment of a sensitive artist…The poems are a challenge and a pleasure to the reader.
— Rosita Chazarreta-Rourke
Now, more than ever…we need poems like Bracho’s to document a more ethical stance to the living planet.