FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER

An undisputed literary event. NPR

Historywith its construction and its destructionis at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wavea new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories. Hilton Als, The New Yorker

Over four decades, Carolyn Forchs visionary work has reinvigorated poetrys power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.

Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and there is nothing that cannot be seen. In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.