It Must Be a Misunderstanding (Poetry)

- Blurb -

Mexican poet, teacher and translator Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951. She has published several books, two in English thanks to the brilliant poet-translator Forrest Gander, who has put this composite volume together, the first time Bracho has been extensively published in the UK. In Mexico she is a formidable presence and influence, one of the most significant writers since Octavio Paz. Her wide-lined, semantically rich poems may remind us of Jorie Graham' s experimental manner. ' Her diction spills out along ceaselessly shifting beds of sound,' says her translator. Her early poems ' make sense first as music, and music propels them' . It Must Be a Misunderstanding is her most personal collection of poems, treating her mother' s Alzheimer' s and death. She finds tenderness, humour, grace, and even a kind of bravery in the interactions of people who encounter each other in a ' Memory Care' facility. In the parallel worlds of residents, a wall might be seen as a man' s starched suit, shadows are real, quiet is strafed with stutters of speech. Things exist and don' t exist at one and the same time. ' As they do,' we are tempted to say in response to the lavish tenderness and empathy of the poems. Bracho gradually reveals her mother' s inimitably strong, quirky nature.