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Carcanet to release Bracho collection in first extensive UK publication
Carcanet Press has secured It Must Be a Misunderstanding: New and Selected Poems by Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander.
Editor and associate publisher John McAuliffe acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Declan Spring at New Directions. The collection will be published on 28th July 2022.
In Mexico, Bracho is a “formidable” presence and influence, hailed by the publisher as one of the most significant writers since Octavio Paz. She has previously written Ese espacio ese jardin, which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. Gander, Bracho’s translator, has translated her work previously and has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award.
It Must Be a Misunderstanding, Bracho’s most personal collection to date, exploring her mother’s Alzheimer’s and death, will also mark the first time Bracho has been extensively published in the UK. Rather than focus on loss, Bracho tracks the bonds between mother and daughter and the struggle for dignity and selfhood throughout a disabling illness.
Gander added: “Although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The ‘plot’ follows a general trajectory – from early to late Alzheimer’s – with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness. We come to know an opinionated, demonstrative elderly woman whose resilience, in the face of her dehiscent memory, becomes most clear in her adaptive strategies. The poems involve us in the mind’s bafflement and wonder, in its creative quick-change adjustments, and in the emotional drama that draws us across the widening linguistic gaps that reroute communication.”
