An evening with Carolyn Forché at Houston Public Library
About
Join us on Thursday, September 24 at the Houston Public Library for an evening with celebrated poet Carolyn Forché, in honor of her most recent collection of poetry, Otherwise.
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.
A landmark collection of new and selected poems chronicling five decades of work marked by moral courage, radical empathy, and unflinching witness, 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.”
Throughout these poems of unparalleled moral conviction, there resounds a “sense of responsibility: to the fullness of lives unnecessarily [bound]; to poetry and its insistence on meaning; to attention and action, no matter the cost” (World Literature Today) that has defined Forché’s work—an inimitable, monumental contribution to American letters.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are In the Lateness of the World, Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. She has also published her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
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.
A landmark collection of new and selected poems chronicling five decades of work marked by moral courage, radical empathy, and unflinching witness, 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.”
Throughout these poems of unparalleled moral conviction, there resounds a “sense of responsibility: to the fullness of lives unnecessarily [bound]; to poetry and its insistence on meaning; to attention and action, no matter the cost” (World Literature Today) that has defined Forché’s work—an inimitable, monumental contribution to American letters.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are In the Lateness of the World, Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. She has also published her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
