Coral Bracho

A selection from her first two collections was included in the definitive anthology of contemporary neo-baroque writing from Latin America, Medusario (1996), edited by Roberto Echavarren, José Koser and Jacobo Sefamí.

Like many of the writers who operate in this line that runs from Luis de Góngora through José Lezama Lima, Bracho's early poems marry verbal luxuriance with a keen intelligence and awareness of artistic process.

They also tend to rein in the long lines of the earlier collections, replacing fluid syntax with what Julio Trujillo has described as a versification that ‘no es, al cabo, una cuestión meramente rítmica sino casi silogística: el movimiento es conceptual, se pasa de una deducción a otra' [isn't, in the end, merely rhythmical but syllogistic; the movement is conceptual, it passes from one deduction to another].

Coral Bracho creates a space so charmed and charged I never wanted to leave it.”—Carole Maso[2] "Poetry may be the most immediately sensuous literary form, but its language tends to substitute for touch rather than enact it.

In "Being toward Death," Bracho combines a quiet inwardness that is also a vulnerable openness: “(—Children trace their liquid howl on the bark, / as a vegetal ghost) // —The flames lick-out from the night, from its long roots.

But Bracho has always had the ability to make happiness seem slightly dangerous, as her poetry doesn't so much speak the unspeakable as voice its constant and quavering proximity."