From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and central figure in American poetry, a landmark collection of new and selected poems chronicling five decades of work marked by moral courage, radical empathy, and unflinching witness.
Over half a century, Carolyn Forché has exemplified how a poet’s voice can cut through the cacophony of an age and speak to our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. Otherwhere spans her groundbreaking career, including the poems crafted in her early twenties from Gathering the Tribes (1976), a world of “horse-breath weather” and the whispering aspens of her grandmother’s Slovak; the “poetry of courage and compassion” (Margaret Atwood) in The Country Between Us (1981); and the elegiac realm of In the Lateness of the World (2020), with its bygone friends, besieged cities, and dreams of the displaced.
Otherwhere gathers the finest poems of Forché’s body of work, selected by the poet herself, and includes a short new collection “If there is ink,” which lights a signal fire in a state of emergency. In these new poems, Forché sifts through the new ruins of the present, conjuring the early days of an emergency where people “pretend to live / as we have always lived,” and cautioning “There are no secrets to staying completely invisible so they are not included here.”
As Hilton Als writes in The New Yorker, “Toni Morrison once observed that there is no such thing as bigger than life: life is big. Forché, in her profoundly ambitious work, aims to capture that bigness, line by line.”
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are In the Lateness of the World, Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. She has also published her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
Forché will be in conversation with Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, and The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism. She has received the 2019 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle, the 2023 John Seigenthaler “Legends Award” and the 2023 Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Reviewing from Washington Monthly Magazine.