Carolyn Forche

A new poetry collection of uncanny grace and moral force from one of our country's most celebrated poets Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché envisions a place where "you could see everything at once ... every moment you have lived or place you have been." The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and "there is nothing that cannot be seen." In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

Poems

In the Lateness of the World

The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where ForchÉ worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. ForchÉ's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

The Country Between Us

"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted. "The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence." -- Robert Boyers

Blue Hour

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to give voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

The Angel of History

Carolyn Forché

The book opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where ForchE worked as a journalist and was closely involved with the political struggle in that tortured country in the late 1970's. ForchE's other poems also tend to be personal, immediate, and moving. Perhaps the final effect of her poetry is the image of a sensitive, brave, and engaged young woman who has made her life a journey. She has already traveled to many places, as these poems indicate, but beyond that is the sense of someone who is, in Ignazio Silone's words, coming from far and going far.

Poems include portraits of life in El Salvador, a veteran of the Vietnam War, and a childhood friend.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

He wakes from his afternoon siesta, / flapping legs and hands, / a bluebird perched on the birch/ branch of mother's arm/ ready to raid/ cornfields/ in his father's heart/ THE ESAI POEMS is the first of four books under the series title of BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DARKNESS by American Book Award recipient Jimmy Santiago Baca. The Esai poems are a poignant blend of Baca's wonder of his and his partner's newborn son, and the thoughts and observations of the world he will be inheriting, includlding, including war, racism, indifference and greed. Through Esai the wonder-struck new father explores the idealic world of his family through Esai's new eyes, "He studies his hands as if they are newly discovered planets . . ." but realizing the harsh realities of our times adds perspective with juxtapositions: "I'll wait to tell him how in some places armies cut off the hands of rebels..." Written as a series of thematically connected and dated poems, moving back and forth between ideas, The Esai Poems are some of Baca's strongest poetic work. Already father of two grown sons, Baca explors the implications of beginning another family with another woman. Subsiquent volumes will include explorations of self and family with Essays and Stories, The Lucia Poems (to his young daugher), and to his son, Tones and Gabe Poems and Essays.

The Esai Poems

Philip Gerard

Associated Writing Programs

Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, and Lee Gutkind are among more than thirty writers and teachers affiliated with the Associated Writing Programs who use examples from his or her own work to introduce the craft of creative nonfiction.

Carolyn Forche

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