A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2026
Praise for Otherwhere
"A tour de force collection...honed and unflinching poems... each word is a stone, blade, bullet, or bone as the poet traces the trauma of war in Europe, Japan, Beirut, and El Salvador...This is an essential and mighty book of courageous attention, exacting artistry, and redeeming radiance." —Booklist, STARRED review
"This dazzling retrospective spans five decades and traces the evolution of one of contemporary poetry’s most powerful voices...a wonderful testament to Forché’s enduring poetic vision." —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
"Forché, like Adrienne Rich, has always positioned her poems at the precise intersection of the personal and the political, bearing public witness to injustice by checking her own pulse and then looking up and out with fierce attention and an ear for the layered music of suffering and hope . . . This is an essential body of late-Twentieth and early-Twenty-First Century poetry; humanity is brutal and craven, these poems show again and again, and sometimes heroic." —LitHub
Description
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 language; 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.”
Throughout these poems of unparalleled moral conviction, there resounds a “sense of responsibility: to the fullness of lives unnecessarily [bound]; to poetry and its insistence on meaning; to attention and action, no matter the cost” (World Literature Today) that has defined Forché’s work—an inimitable, monumental contribution to American letters.
Reviews
Praise for Carolyn Forché
“Forché’s ability to wed the ‘political’ with the ‘personal’ places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review
"Forché’s almost incantatory way with image produces a strange tone, spell-bound but also emotionally charged, in which time and place shift and blur—because we’re all implicated." —The Guardian
"Forché’s stately stanzas—her writing is never hurried—are the work of a literary reporter, Gloria Emerson as filtered through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop or Grace Paley. Free of jingoism but not of moral gravity, Forché’s work questions—when it does question—how to be or to become a thinking, caring, communicating adult...She asks us to consider the sometimes unrecognized, though always felt, ways in which power inserts itself into our lives and to think about how we can move forward with what we know. One feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories." —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
"In the Lateness of the World is a testament to the aftermath of human culture . . . Forché’s belief that it is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth from these wounded cities creates poems that are sometimes difficult to reckon with even as they soar in moments of unexpected beauty." —The New York Times Book Review
"Anyone familiar with Forché’s work knows that her poetry of witness moves well beyond stunning imagery, having broad implications for the lives it hopes to remember and the readers it hopes to implore. . . . There is in these poems a sense of responsibility: to the fullness of lives unnecessarily unbound; to poetry and its insistence on meaning; to attention and action, no matter the cost." —World Literature Today
"Auden once wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, but in Forché's work, her life-long commitment to poetry and the poetic utterance, we see how poetry can transform." —Independent (Ireland)
