Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. An articulate defender of her own aims as well as the larger goals of poetry, Forché is perhaps best-known for coining the term “poetry of witness.” Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.
“Forché’s work is unusual in that it straddles the realms of the political and the poetic, addressing political and social issues in poetry when many poets have abandoned these subjects altogether. In recognizing the link Forché has made between these worlds, the Hiroshima Foundation recognizes her human rights work as much as it does her writing.” – Hope J. Smith, in the Madison Gazette
Otherwhere spans five decades of Carolyn Forché’s work, from the poems she wrote in her early twenties in Gathering the Tribes (1976) to the elegiac In the Lateness of the World (2020). Selected by the poet herself, the collection gathers the finest work of her career alongside a new sequence, “If there is ink,” written in response to the present moment.
As Hilton Als writes in The New Yorker, Forché’s work aims “to capture that bigness, line by line.”
On Sale September 8, 2026
OTHERWHERE: New and Selected Poems 1976 – 2026 will be published by Simon & Schuster on September 8th, 2026. A number of related events are currently being planned and will be added here as we get closer to the publication date.
| Date | Venue |
|---|---|
| July 12, 5 - 7pm | Poetry Reading + Conversation with Carolyn Forché, Dorianne Laux, Tina Chang This is an online event. Register here to attend |
| Sep 8 | Princeton Public Library 65 Witherspoon St, Princeton, NJ 08542 |
| Sep 10 | Greenlight Bookstore 686 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11217 |
| Sep 11 | Porter Square Books 1815 Massachusetts Ave, Suite 118-119, Cambridge, MA 02140 |
| Sep 13, 3:00 PM | Politics and Prose 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008 In conversation with Maureen Corrigan — Learn More |
| Sep 15, 6:30 PM | Literati Bookstore 124 E Washington St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 |
| Sep 22 | Georgetown University |
| Sep 24 | Houston Public Library |
| October 3 | Newcastle Poetry Festival, Newcastle, UK |
| October 11 | Wainsgate Chapel, Est Yorkshire, UK |
| October 16 | Manchester Literature Festivall, Manchester, UK |
| October 17 | Sheffield Off the Shelf, Sheffield, UK |
| November 6 - 8 | Land of Poets Festival, Lviv, Ukraine |
| November 15 | Texas Book Festival, Austin, TX |
| November 21 | Miami Book Fair, Miami, FL |
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