In the Lateness of the World
Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
“An undisputed literary event.” —NPR
“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
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 one another.
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first collection in 17 years, Forch (Blue Hour) powerfully weaves poems of witness, a travelogue steeped in elegiac contemplation of life in Finland, Italy, Russia, and, most affectingly, Vietnam. These 41 poems vibrantly catalogue human artifacts and those of the natural world. In "Hue: From a Notebook," she writes: "There was then the whir of stork wings, and bicycle chains ringing./ It is still now the way the air is still just before the mine explodes.// Once we fired at each other. Now we pass silence back and forth." Throughout, the speakers are meditative but unflinching in the face of war's aftermath and ecological crisis: "From here a dog finds his way through snow with a human bone... Even the clocks have run out of time." "Museum of Stones" displays a delightedly crackling verbal texture reminiscent of poems by Seamus Heaney ("stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,/ agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards"). Such weights anchor Forche's genuinely moving consideration of "ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us/ for an instant... radiant with significance," communicating an urgent and affecting vision.
