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.”
| Date | Venue |
|---|---|
| Sep 15, 6:30 PM | Literati Bookstore In conversation with Rachael DeWoskin 124 E Washington St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 |
| Sep 18-20 | Oslo International Poetry Festival Oslo, Norway |
| Sep 22, 7:00 PM | Georgetown University - Copley Formal Lounge In conversation with Maureen Corrigan |
| Sep 24 | Houston Public Library |
| October 3, 6pm - 8:30pm | Newcastle Poetry Festival, Griffin Gala: Rachael Boast, Carolyn Forché, Sarah Howe, Roger Reeves & Aleš Šteger co-hosted by The Griffin Poetry Prize Newcastle, UK |
| October 11 | Wainsgate Chapel, Est Yorkshire, UK UNSPEAKABLE: An Evening With Carolyn Forché and Kwame Dawes Wainsgate Chapel, Wainsgate, Hebden Bridge HX7 8SU Entry: £17. Tickets & event information here |
| October 16 | Manchester Literature Festivall, Carolyn Forché & Kwame Dawes Manchester Central Library Entry: £12 / £10 Tickets & event information here (Phone bookings: 0161 876 2015) |
| October 17 | Sheffield Off the Shelf, Sheffield, UK Poetry of Resistance and Transcendence: Carolyn Forché & Kwame Dawes Showroom Cinema, Sheffield Entry: £14/£12 Tickets & event information Land of Poets Festival, Lviv, Ukraine |
| October 20, 7pm GMT | Bloodaxe, UK publisher of Otherwhere, online launch reading Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley will be joined by Jane Clarke, Carolyn Forché and Chase Twichell. All three poets will be reading live from their new poetry books, followed by a discussion about their work. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page. If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event. For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards below or via the same YouTube page. |
| 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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