Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2026

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 language; 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."

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.

Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.27w x 0.95d
ISBN: 9781668218242


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/27/2026
Booklist 08/01/2026

About the Author
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.