Coral Bracho

Mexican poet and translator Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City, where she still lives and teaches. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Firefly under the Tongue: Selected Poems (2008), translated by poet Forrest Gander; Cuarto de hotel (2007); Ese espacio, ese jardín (2003), which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize; Tierra de entraña ardiente (1992), a collaboration with painter Irma Palacios; and El ser que va a morir (1982). Bracho’s impact on Mexican poetry has been compared to poet John Ashbery’s influence on American verse. Bracho’s layered, long-lined poems attend equally to sound patterns and lush, unspooling imagery. As Gander observes, “Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound. … Bracho’s early poems make sense first as music, and music propels them.”

A selection of poems from her first two collections was included in the anthologies Medusario (1996, ed. Roberto Echavarren, José Kozer, and Jacobo Sefamí), Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry (2002), and Líneas Conectadas: nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos (Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico, 2006, edited by Luis Cortés Bargalló and Forrest Gander). Her poetry was translated for the Poetry Translation Center’s 2005 World Poets’ Tour by Tom Boll and poet Katherine Pierpoint. 

Bracho’s honors include the Aguacalientes National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.