FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER
"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.