In the Lateness of the World

“The title of Carolyn Forché’s new collection seems prophetic. Seventeen years in the making, In the Lateness of the World is an act of witness, going repeatedly into the darkness of death and loss. . . .  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. Taken together, Forché’s five books of verse—the most recent, ‘In the Lateness of the World’ (Penguin Press), was published in March—are about action: memory as action, vision and writing as action. 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. History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of ‘In the Lateness of the World’ . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
 
“Amid almost incomprehensible world devastation, [In the Lateness of the World] reminds us that personhood and acknowledgement by the other are gifts that poetry, with its associative, nonlinear forms of thinking and embodied forms of knowing, is uniquely positioned to offer.” —Boston Review

“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

“An undisputed literary event.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

“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
 
“Carolyn Forché’s fourth poetry collection, Blue Hour, appeared in 2003, and her readers have longed for the next ever since. It’s hard to imagine any poetry book worth a wait of 17 years. Forché’s new collection, In the Lateness of the World, is worth more.” —Sojourners

“Auden once wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, but in Forche’s work, her life-long commitment to poetry and the poetic utterance, we see how poetry can transform. Both What You Have Heard Is True and In the Lateness of the World are essential reading not only for anyone interested in poetry, but in the world we live in.” —Independent (Ireland)

“Throughout her career, Forché has forged poems of witness, and she does so here with beauty and lyricism.”  —Library Journal