Lorna Knowles Blake at The Hudson Review:
In the Lateness of the World[1] is Carolyn Forché’s first collection of poems in seventeen years. Over the past four decades, Forché’s work has grown to exemplify what she describes as “poetry of witness.” In her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Forché argued against “personal” or “political” aims for poems, striving instead to present poets who persisted in writing under the most extreme social duress in conditions of war, exile and imprisonment.
This new collection continues Forché’s journey through histories both personal and political. Working in many modes (elegy, lament, lists, landscapes, prose pieces and various stanza patterns), Forché creates a sense of end times, of a speaker sifting through various bewildering events.
more here.