A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2026

Praise for Otherwhere

"A half-century of Carolyn Forché’s best poems—gathered here, with some brand new work—is reason to celebrate, and definitely something to look forward to." —LitHub

Praise for Carolyn Forché

“Forché’s ability to wed the ‘political’ with the ‘personal’ places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

"Forché’s almost incantatory way with image produces a strange tone, spell-bound but also emotionally charged, in which time and place shift and blur—because we’re all implicated." —The Guardian

"Forché’s stately stanzas—her writing is never hurried—are the work of a literary reporter, Gloria Emerson as filtered through the eyes of Elizabeth Bishop or Grace Paley. Free of jingoism but not of moral gravity, Forché’s work questions—when it does question—how to be or to become a thinking, caring, communicating adult...She asks us to consider the sometimes unrecognized, though always felt, ways in which power inserts itself into our lives and to think about how we can move forward with what we know. One feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories." —Hilton Als, The New Yorker

"In the Lateness of the World is a testament to the aftermath of human culture . . . Forché’s belief that it is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth from these wounded cities creates poems that are sometimes difficult to reckon with even as they soar in moments of unexpected beauty." —The New York Times Book Review

"Anyone familiar with Forché’s work knows that her poetry of witness moves well beyond stunning imagery, having broad implications for the lives it hopes to remember and the readers it hopes to implore. . . . There is in these poems a sense of responsibility: to the fullness of lives unnecessarily unbound; to poetry and its insistence on meaning; to attention and action, no matter the cost." —World Literature Today

"Auden once wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, but in Forché's work, her life-long commitment to poetry and the poetic utterance, we see how poetry can transform." —Independent (Ireland)