Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2026

By Carolyn Forché

Book Overview

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 Forch 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 Forch '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, Forch 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 Forch 's work--an inimitable, monumental contribution to American letters.

• Format: Audio CD
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1668153432
• ISBN13: 9781668153437
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Length: 1 Pages