Here's a sneak preview from Carolyn Forché's exclusive commentary on her PBS Spring Recommendation In The Lateness of the World.
"In the Lateness of the World was written over a period of seventeen years, during the first two decades of the 21st century, poems arriving in clusters with silences between them as if no time had passed... This is a deeply personal book, filled with disclosures"
Carolyn's first volume of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Press, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award and long-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness.
In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She is one of the first poets to receive the Wyndham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and is a visiting professor at Newcastle University, and University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
PBS Members can read the full interview with Carolyn on the inspirations behind her new collection in the Spring Bulletin. Join the Poetry Book Society by 14th February to ensure you're on the Spring mailing list.