On today’s episode, we are travelling again to Mexico to spend some time with the work of Coral Bracho, winner of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize in 1981 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000.
The PTC first published Bracho’s work in 2008 when she was part of our Mexican Poets Tour along with Victor Teran and David Hurta. Her work was translated by Tom Boll with the poet Katherine Pierpoint.
Bracho’s early poems marry verbal luxuriance with a keen intelligence and awareness of the artistic process. Yet that artistic consciousness doesn’t lose sight of world. Her poems have been seen as part of a neo-baroque trend in Latin American literature and in 1996 her work was included in the definitive anthology of contemporary neo-baroque writing from Latin America.
Neo-baroque writing can be seen as the foundational literary movement of Latin America, with writers taking on the ornate literary and artistic styles of a ‘transplanted’ European Baroque as a way of disrupting more classical orderly forms of writing.
Today’s poems are Of Their Eyes Adorned with Crystal Sands, which sounds neo-baroque and Touches Its Depths and Is Stirred Up, a title that doubles as a good working definition of poetry itself.
