Margins
Firefly Under the Tongue book cover
Firefly Under the Tongue
Selected Poems
2008
First Published
4.23
Average Rating
144
Number of Pages

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 ámbar 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.

Avg Rating
4.23
Number of Ratings
77
5 STARS
47%
4 STARS
34%
3 STARS
17%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Coral Bracho
Coral Bracho
Author · 6 books
Bracho is winner of the Aguacalientes National Poetry Prize in 1981 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She received the 2004 Xavier Villaurrutia Award for her book, Ese Espacio, Ese Jardin. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (National Artists’ Center), and in 2007 she was awarded the award “Programa de Aliento a la Obra Literaria de la Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas” in recognition of her work.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved