"The title of Carolyn Forché’s new collection seems prophetic. Seventeen years in the making, In the Lateness of the World is an act of witness, going repeatedly into the darkness of death and loss. . . . 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. Taken together, Forché’s five books of verse—the most recent, ‘In the Lateness of the World’ (Penguin Press), was published in March—are about action: memory as action, vision and writing as action. 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. 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

“Amid almost incomprehensible world devastation, [In the Lateness of the World] reminds us that personhood and acknowledgement by the other are gifts that poetry, with its associative, nonlinear forms of thinking and embodied forms of knowing, is uniquely positioned to offer.”—Boston Review