Carolyn Forché: A Reading From In the Lateness of the World: Poems

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. She also wrote a memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. Forché´s In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press) her first collection in seventeen years, 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. 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.” The Guardian proclaimed that the title of her new collection “seems prophetic. […] In the Lateness of the World is an act of witness, going repeatedly into the darkness of death and loss.”