Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2026

by Carolyn Forché

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and central figure in American poetry, a landmark collection of new and selected poems chronicling five decades of work marked by moral courage, radical empathy, and unflinching witness.

Over half a century, Carolyn Forché has exemplified how a poet’s voice can cut through the cacophony of an age and speak to our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. Otherwhere spans her groundbreaking career, including the poems crafted in her early twenties from Gathering the Tribes (1976), a world of “horse-breath weather” and the whispering aspens of her grandmother’s Slovak; the “poetry of courage and compassion” (Margaret Atwood) in The Country Between Us (1981); and the elegiac realm of In the Lateness of the World (2020), with its bygone friends, besieged cities, and dreams of the displaced.

Otherwhere gathers the finest poems of Forché’s body of work, selected by the poet herself, and includes a short new collection “If there is ink,” which lights a signal fire in a state of emergency. In these new poems, Forché sifts through the new ruins of the present, conjuring the early days of an emergency where people “pretend to live / as we have always lived,” and cautioning “There are no secrets to staying completely invisible so they are not included here.”

As Hilton Als writes in The New Yorker, “Toni Morrison once observed that there is no such thing as bigger than life is big. Forché, in her profoundly ambitious work, aims to capture that bigness, line by line.”

272 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication September 8, 2026

About the author

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1950. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems with Munir Akash (2003), Claribel Alegria's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.

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Reviews

[Jessica Milliner · Rating 5 out of 5]

These collections of poems show Carolyn’s writing through the years. Expressing it with a poet’s voice. Reading it is like she’s telling a story. I like this book.