Carolyn Forché

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs

Average customer rating:

an excellent resource
Does Creative Nonfiction Exist?
Nicholas Hentoff rules
From biography and true-life adventure to narrative history
A Journey for Writers and Teachers of Writing

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs

Manufacturer: Writer's Digest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (Wiley Books for Writers Series)
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction
Writing Creative Nonfiction: Fiction Techniques for Crafting Great Nonfiction
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The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

ASIN: 1884910505

Amazon.com

Like eating a well-conceived meal at an exceptional restaurant, reading this book is a wholly satisfying experience. Less-skilled chefs may have failed to get the book's many disparate elements to cohere, but, in the hands of editors Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard, those ingredients sing. Brenda Miller compares the shape of a lyric essay with that of a loaf of challah bread; Nicholas S. Hentoff and Harvey A. Silverglate offer a primer on legal land mines. Christopher Merrill ponders the art of war writing, while Dinty W. Moore explores,the use of humor in creative nonfiction. There's an essay about bringing oneself into the story, and another about taking oneself out. Bob Reiss offers hilarious yet salient advice on surviving as a writer overseas. The contributors (Annie Dillard, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, et al.) spend the first half of the book discussing creative nonfiction and the second half demonstrating it. Not only does the format work, but pairing the works of creative nonfiction with the accompanying commentary is educational and entertaining.

Among the book's most interesting sections, perhaps because their subject matter is underrepresented in writing-reference literature, are those about biography. Philip Furia discusses the need both to conduct an unbelievable amount of research and to leave a whole bunch of it out. And Honor Moore focuses on the intensity of biography writing: "I had no idea I was getting into twelve long years during which I would put preoccupation with someone else's life ahead of attention to my own." --Jane Steinberg

Book Description

Writing Creative Nonfiction presents more than thirty essays on today's hottest literary form--creative nonfiction. The stellar line-up of contributors includes Philip Lopate, William Least-Heat Moon, Diane Ackerman, Ted Conover, Dinty Moore and many others. From researching ideas and structuring the story, to reportage and personal reflection, this book covers every key element of the craft. Each essay is followed by three exercises for hands-on learning.

* An impressive line up of the best teachers from the finest writing programs throughout the country * Creative nonfiction titles are hot--with new books hitting the bestseller lists everyday! * The AWP's role guarantees strong consumer and academic interest

Customer Reviews:

an excellent resource.......2006-01-19

whilst one can not expect every chapter to be directly relevant, i found each of them thought provoking. this book has enabled me to view the genre, and my writing attempts, in a new light.

an essential read for anyone interested in writing narrative non-fiction.

Does Creative Nonfiction Exist?.......2003-07-27

Over the past several years there has been quite a controversy as to what exactly is creative nonfiction.
In fact, there are some who even go so far as denying its existence and claim there is no such animal!
If we are from the school that accepts that it is alive and kicking, we must then be able to describe what exactly is creative nonfiction.

Carolyn Fauché and Philip Gerard, editors of Writing Creative Nonficton, perhaps best sum up what it is all about when they state: "creative nonfiction has emerged in the last few years as the province of factual prose that is also literary-infused with the stylistic devices, tropes, and rhetorical flourishes of the best fiction and the most lyrical narrative poetry. It is fact based writing that remains compelling, undiminished by the passage of time, that has at heart an interest in enduring human values: foremost a fidelity to accuracy, to truthfulness."

In order to support their belief in creative nonfiction, Fauché and Gerard have presented more than thirty essays that examine all of above key ingredients inherent in writing creative nonfiction.
Divided into three sections, the reader will receive tips pertaining to such topics as researching ideas and structuring the story, reportage, personal reflection, developing powerful observation techniques, awareness of the filters that put you between yourself and the world, shaping the lyric essay, creating biography, war writing, using humor, and taking yourself out of the story.

What is quite noteworthy about the book is that the reader receives valuable advice from over thirty well- known writers such as: Terry Tempest Williams, Allan Cheuse, Phillip Lopate, Carolyn Forché, and Philip Gerard, all of whom contribute immensely in convincing us that, yes, creative nonfiction does exist.
It may be true that it has undergone many name changes over the years- nonfiction novel, narrative non-fiction, literary journalism, literary non-fiction, and new journalism, however, they all lead us to the conclusion that no matter how confusing it sounds, creative nonfiction is still distinguishable from daily journalism, academic criticism, and critical biography.

The book also offers a primer on the practical business of drafting a business proposal as presented by Stanley Colbert, and a section about what happens after publication.
Finally, as the editors most aptly state: "as a final gift to the reader, we've included the `Creative Non-Fiction' reader offering the companion pieces and other exemplary essays to inspire, delight, reach, and simply to enjoy."

This review first appeared on the reviewer's own site: Bookpleasures.com

Nicholas Hentoff rules.......2001-10-11

This book is almost uniformly excellent, but the essay by Nicholas Hentoff alone is worth the purchase price. Hentoff, a semi-legendary Arizona criminal defense lawyer and champion of civil rights, offers invaluable advice to nonfiction writers on avoiding legal landmines, and therefore avoiding the tendency towards self-censorship. Every journalist who cares about doing work that matters should have a copy of this essay.

From biography and true-life adventure to narrative history.......2001-08-16

In Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction And Insights From The Teachers Of The Associated Writing Programs, the editorial team of Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard present essays by more than thirty contributors focusing on all aspects and elements of the creative writing craft as it applies to nonfiction. This outstanding compendium of presentations ranges from researching ideas and structuring a story to reportage and personal reflection. Along with insightful prompts and exercises, Writing Creative Nonfiction covers every type and category from biography and true-life adventure, to memoir and narrative history. Here is an invaluable reference whose reading will enrich and enable any aspiring writer to significantly advance their skills and expertise at writing nonfiction whatever the extent of their previous experience or training.

A Journey for Writers and Teachers of Writing.......2001-07-14

I purchased this book as an inspiration for designing the Advanced Feature Writing class and others I teach at Northwestern University. As I read and did some of the exercises suggested in the book, I began to realize how useful this book is not only for aspiring and senior writers of all kinds, but also for those who teach others to write.

It's a compendium of essays and writing exercises written by various authors from poet to essayist to magazine feature article writer, with some selections of their writings at the end of the book.

Don't let the long titles of mini-chapters steer you away from this book. For example, one chapter is entitled "Saying goodbye to once upon a time or implementing postmodernism in creative nonfiction." It may sound daunting, but the chapter is written clearly, creatively and thoughtfully about how fact, truth and fiction often get tangled when we write. The author of this chapter, Laura Wexler, shows us that the only place we can find cold, hard facts is in fairy tales. Yes, that's right. Fairy tales. Because in a fairy tale we can all say with certainty that Cinderella lost her glass slipper and Prince Charming found it and placed it on her foot, and they got married. But life isn't like that. And neither is nonfiction writing.

Wexler writes, regarding the Rodney King beating: "The Rodney King beating cannot be told as a fairy tale. There is no single true version of What Happened. Because everything about it is up for grabs, everything is unstable: motives, actions, and interpretations. It seems we cannot, despite Rodney King's famous plea, 'all get along' -- because we tell different stories about the same events. We always do." Wexler, however, does not leave us perlexed and discouraged about this "fact." Instead she offers insights and advice on how to write while remembering the nebulous qualitites of truth, fact, and fiction.

Incidentally, references to recent events such as the Rodney King beating pepper the essays throughout the book making it "fresh" and "new."

Not every chapter is as captivating as the one described above, and occasionally, some of the authors of the essays tend to become preocuppied with their knowledge of other authors and writing. And although I enjoyed the chapter on humor writing, I had hoped for much more on this subject. We need not be told that irony, satire and exaggeration are tools in humorous writing; rather we need to be shown how to use them, what works, and what doesn't.

The writing and interviewing exercises in the book are worthwhile, and I would have liked more. One example: Interview separately two people who were involved in the same event. Transcribe the interviews and consider the similarities and differences in the two versions.

This exercise is terrific for journalists as well as creative writers.

As a writer and editor, I found the book to be reaffirming as well as challenging. Many of the writing philosophies I've developed over the years are explained in exemplary fashion in this book. I am eager to work with my students on the exercises, and to share some of the chapters with my writing and editing colleagues.

Sheryl De Vore Assistant Managing Editor, Pioneer Press Senior Lecturer, Northwestern University, Journalism Department sdevore@voyager.net

Against forgetting: Twentieth-century poetry of witness
Average customer rating:

A powerful, passionate and profound anthology.

Too political and patriotic

Poetry of hope and suffering

moving accounts of personal experience and loss

"I stand as witness ...

Against forgetting: Twentieth-century poetry of witness

Manufacturer: W.W. Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Angel of History

The Country Between Us

Blue Hour: Poems

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ASIN: 0393033724

Customer Reviews:

A powerful, passionate and profound anthology........2006-02-17

The purposes of the anothology are stated in the title: Against Forgetting. Poetry of Witness. Forche confines the anthology to the century we have defined ourselves by - the XXth. Yet, the sections have explanations - material provided by Forche proving that already, this amnesia to the horrors of violence has been dooming us to repeat ourselves.

How better to transmit the lessons of culture, of the "political" and "patriotic" (along with their varying definitions) than through poetry?

The selections in this collection have been thoughtfully made and the translations are excellent. Without exception, we have a volume to force us to reflect, to ask ourselves difficult questions. We might not like our answers but perhaps we will have our own poems as well, and our poems will serve as an antidote to forgetting - perhaps they too, will bear witness should we not be able to.

Too political and patriotic.......2004-04-20

If you love political and patriotic poems, this book can be a good choice, but such themes are complete turn-off to me. This book comprised of the following chapters: The American genocide, World War I, Revolution and Repression in the Soviet Union, Spanish Civil War, World War II, The Haolocaust, Repression in Eastern and Central Europe, War and Dictatorship in the Demditerranean, War in the Middle East, Repression and Revolution in Latin America, The Struggle for Civil Rights and Civil Leberties in the US, War in Korea and Vietname, Repression in Africa, Revolution and the Struggle for Democracy in China.
I can hardly believe that these are poetries. These are simply political phrases disguised using poetry form. All the poems are so boring to appreciate. I find that it is much better to read the books relavant to each chapter. I regret that I wasted money and time on this book. In fact, I threw this book to trash.

Poetry of hope and suffering.......2003-07-02

Please take the time to read a few of the sample poems. This book is a profound and moving account of suffering, loss, longing and hope that really hit home. THe poems will speak for themselves.

Hermann Hesse's "Poems" is also along this same line of thought and it is available in translation with the German on the facing page.

moving accounts of personal experience and loss.......2003-06-29

This book has done so much to call us not to forget our own humanity. The impersonal power of war, the dehumanization of violent death at the hands of other humans- such tragedies as these call us to remember who we are as humans. It is one of the peculiarities of life that it is often at the brink of destruction that we see most clearly what our hearts have always spoken to us. In the violence of war and conflict, our thoughts often return to the simple things of life; the laughter of a child who lived next door, the smell of spring, the faces of old schoolmates.

This collection of poetry serves its title well. Only one poem spoken aptly to our heart calls us to our true selves, against forgetting.

You may also find the poems of Hermann Hesse of importance in this regard, along with the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.

"I stand as witness ..........2001-04-15

to the common lot, / survivor of that time, that place." Anna Akhmatova, one of the poets included in this anthology, wrote those words in the years before WWII as she struggled to survive, and express, life under Stalin.

Carolyn Forche has assembled this collection of poems, each of which expresses, in their own time and place, witness. This is not an idle witness, a standing by, a cool, detached observance. Forche writes in her introduction, "Modernity ...is marked by a superstitious worship of oppressive force and by a concomitant reliance on oblivion." The witness of these poets neither worships force nor accepts oblivion.

The effect of reading these poems, written in the face of war, genocide, oppression, despair and racism, even reading one or two at a time as I have been doing, raises the possibility that war, genocide, oppression, despair and racism are abject failures. Whatever their effects, they accomplish nothing. Resistance counts for everything. Pasternak, an included poet, described his novel in words which describe this volume: "besides the importance of described human lots and historical events there is an effort ... to portray the whole sequence of facts and beings and happenings like some moving entireness, like a developing, passing by, rolling and rushing inspiration, as if reality itself had freedom and choice and was composing itself out of numberless varients and versions."

Men and women from every continent give lie in their poems to the sad accusation that 'human dignity' and 'human rights' are 'western' or 'american' ideas imposed on the rest of the world. The oppressors are as likely to be 'western' and 'american' as anyone else. The witnesses "Against Forgetting" are everyone.

Because of witness, because of resistance, hope exists. As another poet (Muriel Rukeyser) suggests: The whole thing - waterfront, war, city, / sons, daughters, me - / Must be re-imagined, / Sun on the orange-red roof.

Customer Reviews:

Beautiful book for a girl.......2007-02-17

I bought this book for my son, but it focuses on a girl throughout. If I had a daughter, it would be great. As the title has God in it, it is very bible and religion oriented which might not be for some people. I just wish I had realized that it wouldn't have drawings of girls and boys. Doesn't really get the message I wanted to convey across to my son.

Adding Color Adds Beauty.......2003-02-10

I love this book. My favorite uncle used to say that all people are God's masterpieces because God sometimes mixes colors to make bonus colors and more beautiful people. "God picked out our colors," this very astute and loving man used to say. "He wanted more beauty for the world so He was always thinking up more beautiful colors to add to it."

This book affirms that sentiment; this book is a very good reflection on diversity, individuality and being human. Three cheers for this book!

Pretty Colors.......2001-08-06

I bought this book for my two youngest grandchildren who are 2 and 4. My daughter said that they loved it. There is so much out there to destroy a child's self-esteem, that it is nice to find a book that will affirm it for them. I hope they get years of enjoyment from this book.

The most perfect book in my child's library.......2000-08-31

As a parent in a transracial adoption, I am continually frustrated by the anorexic selection of role models for my African-American child in children's literature. I try to surround my child with deafening messages of self-love and self-worth and celebrate the beautiful brown hue! This book takes passages of the bible and translates it into self-empowering beliefs for a child of any color. The illustrations are warm and well-done, the text is simple, but poetic. The book itself is sturdy and can take a beating. I adore this book. It cost a little more than most other children's books, but it's well worth it!

Beautiful Black Children.......2000-04-14

As I read COLORS COME FROM GOD JUST LIKE ME I wished that I had a book like this growing up. Many Black Children are exposed daily to sterotypes and negative images (from society and the media) regarding their veil (skin tone) and because of this they begin to view their veil as inferior. This book focuses on the many WONDERFUL colors God gave the world including the MANY skin tones that Blacks posess. As I read this story to my daughter I hope she recieves the same message I obtained, my physical attributes are not inferior, I am beautiful because God created me.

Average customer rating:

Amazing Again
Best Poet in a Dark Time
A bit disappointing
a book of stunning brilliance from this poet of witness
Forche Sets the Pace for her Generation Again

Blue Hour: Poems
Carolyn Forche
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Angel of History
The Country Between Us
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
Overlord : Poems

ASIN: 0060099135
Release Date: 2004-03-30

Book Description

"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted.

<blockquote> "The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence."

-- Robert Boyers </blockquote>

Customer Reviews:

Amazing Again.......2007-03-18

After reading this book I was left with the "wow" feeling. Forche has done it once again! She is an amazing teacher, as well as a writer.

Best Poet in a Dark Time.......2005-01-13

Forche is really the best poet working in this country who's books you can find in the bookstores. Probably the book business people keep her around because they see her as some sort of activist writer with a political base. And that may be true. Still, what's good about her work is its personal honesty. And yada yada all those who blither on in their intellectual neediness. She just tries to tell us things that are difficult to tell. And she's not an intellectual snot, though she probably could be.

A bit disappointing.......2004-06-27

Technically, this volume is the work of a creative poetic master. Unfortunately, occasionally the craftsmanship shows through to the detriment of the message. I once took a poetry workshop led by Carolyn Forche. A piece of advice that has stuck with me was to read nature guides - learn the names of the plants, the clouds, ... In this volume, I am aware that the poet follows her own advice. Unfortunately, this causes an awareness in the reader of the poet's vocabulary in a distracting sense.

I recognize all the reasons reviewers are enchanted by this volume, but I rate it as a small misstep by a wonderful poet.

a book of stunning brilliance from this poet of witness.......2003-11-22

Carolyn Forche is one of the most memorable poets of her generation; her peculiar avant-garde poetry is of endless relevance & massive creative vision. I've already written another review of this book, but I'll have to keep making more notes in reviews as I come to understand it more. I won't understand it all. We live in an age of such chaos, & in this book Carolyn Forche responds to it how a body grows bones with forms of stern order. With the forms of these poems it seems to me that she's positing that underneath any modern chaos is a ruling order, from the long end-stopped lines at the beginning of the book, like the end-stopped lines at the historical beginnings of western poetry, to the 40+ pg single poem with all its lines arranged alphabetically. In a short poem the notes at the end of the book reveal to be about the contaminated land about Chernobyl, in the context of the motions of the whole book, she makes me feel as though perhaps while one can only surrender to change, what is manifest not lasting, this is not an impetus into disorder & what will come is new sense.

Anyways, Carolyn Forche is a wild poet. This incredible book is a very exciting creative advance from her earlier work. Metasticizing cities -- she moves like a platoon.

Forche Sets the Pace for her Generation Again.......2003-05-20

Forche's second book, THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US, elicited almost Pharisitical envy, a reaction that betrayed just how truncated and isolationist the aesthetics of American poetry had become. Her third book, ANGEL OF HISTORY is arguably THE WASTE LAND of the second half of the twentieth century. Never a mere rhetoritician of the political, Forche sets the pace for her generation of poets in her fourth book, demonstrating once again a fearless innovation of content and form. Carolyn Forche's fourth book, BLUE HOUR: POEMS, evokes that limnal state between the truth that is accessed in dreams and waking, when consciousness hovers in extreme receptivity between life and the death that is to come. Blue is the color of God in Orthodox iconography, the color, according to Maxim Gorky's grandmother, of her grandson's soul, and of the premonitory hour before dawn, with all of its connotations of enlightenment and illumination. It is in this new collection especially that one overhears the strains of a visionary's mystical apprehension, harvested from edge of extremity. In "On Earth," the forty-page abecederian hymn with its allusion to The Lord's Prayer ("Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"), Forche catalogs with photographic accuracy the life review of a soul neither able to go forward nor back, a consciousness suspended, as in a surgical theater, above the theater of human events, creating an elegiac commentary upon mankind's ability to create heaven on earth. Included in the volume are eight lyrics of startling beauty, as spectral and haunting as the body in x-rays, riddled with a light that either illuminates or casts a shadow upon our demise. I am reminded of those small and extremely heavy cones in Borges, made of a metal which does not exist in this world, images of divinity in certain religions in Tlon. These beautifully wrought shorter poems return the lyric to its specific gravity-epigrams of matter gleaned at the frontier of consciousness. In a culture where it would be easy for poetry to devolve into a merely anecdotal art, something on the order of California cuisine, Forche reminds us of Wallace Stevens' dictum: " Poetry is that which helps us live" or, as Adrianne Rich has said it: "Poetry is where the imagination's contraband physical and emotional imprintings are most concentrated, most portable." As such, we would do well to preserve in poetry that which is most essential to our humanity. In BLUE HOUR: POEMS, Forche restores poetry to its most sacred purpose and wholeness of being. For this alone, we should give thanks and applaud.

Average customer rating:

Through a young woman's eyes: love and revolution
read and reread
Forché sees evil & names it
Riveting images described beautifully and yet so accurately.
Forche reminds us what is human about witness...

The Country Between Us
Carolyn Forche
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Angel of History
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
Blue Hour: Poems
Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
Rose (New Poets of America Series)

ASIN: 0060909269

Customer Reviews:

Through a young woman's eyes: love and revolution.......2007-06-24

I finished Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us which was simply amazing. I wish I had better words to describe her skill. Her poems are about reluctant revolutionary tendencies, interspersed with love/sex and seeking. There is probably a great deal I could say her about the strength of her work, but it just has to be read to be completely felt. If nothing else find the poem _The Colonel_ as an example of her ability to speak in a new way. One of my favorite books of poems this year.

read and reread.......2001-03-29

Stunning, deep, beautiful and nerve wracking. I've carried this book with me for weeks now, rereading poems and trying to memorize parts of them. There aren't enough stars in the sky to rate this book.

Forché sees evil & names it.......1999-08-06

Forché's poems of El Salvador in the late '70s/early '80s, in the first half of this book, could as well be written about Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Chechnya, or any of another dozen places that are sites of contemporary atrocity. And the U.S.: where all of us, so many of us good people, yes, good people, live on the uppermost levels of a structure of corruption and shame, which we fail, in our stubborn blindness, to recognize: "...I go mad, for example, / in the Safeway, at the many heads / of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples / and coffee, especially the coffee" ("Return," 19). Forché's purpose is not to give us the guilts, nor to turn us into evolutionaries, nor to congratulate herself as someone who is "aware," but to bring witness of objective conditions of evil in which we, as American citizens and consumers, participate.

Riveting images described beautifully and yet so accurately........1999-03-27

The first book of contemporary poetry that I loved in its entirety. Forche's words describe the undescribable in ways that compel us to look at the unbelievable. A treasure.

Forche reminds us what is human about witness..........1998-07-17

Forche's poetry hits you like a rock. She deals in the poetry of the specific, and nothing escapes her. From her harrowing accounts of third-world revolution to the controlled sentiment of her look back on childhood friends, Forche takes the reader's hand and carries us with her, so much so that the walls that she sees are the walls that we see. For anyone needing their faith restored that American poetry is alive and well as we near the end of the 20th century, Forche's book will do that...and more.

Average customer rating:

The Angel of Poetry
almost cruelly intelligent modern poetry
What's the fuss?
THE ANGEL OF HISTORY IS NECESSARY
a genius

The Angel of History
Carolyn Forche
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Country Between Us
Blue Hour: Poems
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
Trilogy

ASIN: 0060925841

Book Description

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forché's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forché attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

Customer Reviews:

The Angel of Poetry.......2006-06-05

Perhaps the Angel of History - witness to cruelty and misery, will join forces with the Angels of Poetry and, through a haunting mosaic of poetic beauty, will somehow discover an end to the horrible suffering and grief in our world.
Evocative of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Angel of Poetry is a plea to keep memory alive, to keep speaking for the dead. Forche has given us a purpose - as both readers and writers of poetry - a truly sacred task.

almost cruelly intelligent modern poetry.......2002-05-24

This book is just so brilliant. The poems are all terseness, & their lyric integrity & elliptical masonry demand very close attention of the reader. This is avant-garde poetry written by the fists of genius.

What's the fuss?.......2000-12-23

Bombastic, pretentious, and overblown. Also irrelevent.

THE ANGEL OF HISTORY IS NECESSARY.......1999-04-13

In the interstices of the times we are living in. A book of poetry like this demanded to be born, and Carolyn Forche was elected parent. Like all great art: political, personal. The epitome of intimacy provides the koan of the distance of being human. This may be the defining poetic book of the nineties, and the end of the century. It is certainly one of those books, and by a poet who doesn't cease to fulfill her "vocation" as poet with great humanity and dignity.

a genius.......1998-09-29

This book is the work of a genius which demands to be read and reread time and again. A heir to the tradition of Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes, Carolyn Forche is able to create a work that once read will never be forgotten. This is not just the major book -- this is the very best. If the Lord Almighty lives in our prayers, this poetry is precisely his own, clear speech. It is a crime not to read this book.

Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Average customer rating:

Beautiful, sensuous poetry
Poetry of Displacement and Replacement
Forché's first book lyrical but not self-involved

Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
Carolyn Forche
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Blue Hour: Poems
The Country Between Us
The Angel of History
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

ASIN: 0300019858

Customer Reviews:

Beautiful, sensuous poetry.......2006-08-29

There is a richness to the poems in this first volume of poems written by Carolyn Forche - words lovingly woven into images and sounds that feel good in your mouth if read aloud. You simply want to taste them, bite into them, savouring their flavour and swallow, feeling them become you. Themes of ethnicity, of friends,lovers, family have underlying themes of displacement and the gathering together of the tribes. It is an important title - Gathering the Tribes - since it has a oneness without surrendering the individuality of one's ethnic group nor self. Very highly recommended.

Poetry of Displacement and Replacement.......2000-10-27

Forche's winning collection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets is filled with language (sometimes emotive, sometimes deliberately stark) about the displacement of culture, love, and harmony coupled with a replacement of belief, identity, and beauty. The poems in the collection show Forche's skill in the early (not beginning) stages of her craft. Mourning and celebration of identity in "The Morning Baking" and "What It Cost" link Forche's history with the burden of passing on those oral records. "Burning the Tomato Worms," "This Is Their Fault," and "Taking Off My Clothes" demonstrate a confidence in sexuality also exhibited in such poets as Marge Piercy and Adrienne Rich. Even Forche's early lyricism in "Calling Down the Moose" and "Song Coming Toward Us" deserve attention. And no one can praise "Kalaloch" better than Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz in the introduction to Forche's manuscript: "In its boldness and innocence and tender, sensuous delight it may very well prove to be the outstanding Sapphic poem of an era."

Forché's first book lyrical but not self-involved.......1999-08-06

Forché's first book, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, has an implicit politicism, with poems about the political intrusions (Terrence Des Pres' term) that led to her grandparents' disclocations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev, and her as-a-matter-of-course discovery of love between women in "Kalaloch." Most poems here tend towards the personal lyric, decidedly unsolipsistic. The poet Stanley Kunitz, judge of that year's Yale Younger Series prize, introduces the collection.

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A Love Song in the Back Pocket of a Martyr
Stirring, Heartrending Collection

The Lives Of Rain
Nathalie Handal
Manufacturer: Interlink
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Neverfield
The Poetry of Arab Women
At the Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996
The Language of Saxophones : Selected Poems of Kamau Daáood
ZaatarDiva

ASIN: 1566566029

Customer Reviews:

A Love Song in the Back Pocket of a Martyr.......2006-03-30

"In the tradition of Darwish, young Palestinian women in the Diaspora are taking up the mantle of modern Palestinian poetry. Nathalie Handal, a "poet in violet solitude" riding "sailboats across the world's heart," beautifully describes the continuing agony of exile of her generation of refugees, who should "no longer be sheets flying to nowhere"...In The Lives of Rain, Handal stands, weeps and celebrates as her poems "travel and move from one continent to the next, move, to be whole." The poet seamlessly weaves her experiences in Europe, Latin America and the Arab world through this "love song in the back pocket of a martyr." Her travels revolve around her current home, New York, where the rain gathers in puddles, ebbs, flows and disperses into lives of love, beauty and pain." -- From the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2006 issue.

Stirring, Heartrending Collection.......2005-07-03

"The Lives of Rain" is a stirring, heartrending collection that forces us to look at the agonizing ramifications of military intervention and the Palestinian diaspora. Nathalie Handal does not point fingers; perhaps we all are to blame on some level. But one thing is clear: Handal is an important and eloquent voice whose poetic vision is as rare as it is necessary.

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Painfully Beautiful
Deeply, deeply touching.
Alive with beauty and emotion
The transformation of grief ...
A beautiful sharing of love,grief, and hope

Sorrow
Claribel Alegria , Carolyn Forche , and Claribel Alegría
Manufacturer: Curbstone Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Spanish | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Spanish | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Spanish | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Caribbean & Latin American | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Soltando Amarras: Casting Off
Fugues
Family Album
Thresholds / Umbrales: Bilingual poems
Companion Through The Darkness: Inner Dialogues on Grief

ASIN: 1880684632

Customer Reviews:

Painfully Beautiful.......2006-03-02

A heartfelt and painfully true portrayal of the realities of grief and death. These beautifully crafted words come from a dark and painful place and emerge into beautiful poignant poems about love and loss.
I reccommed this collection of poems to anyone who has ever lost a loved one. Claribel Alegria masterfully puts into words all the pain, doubt, hope, and sadness you feel in your soul when someone you love dies.

Deeply, deeply touching........2001-11-10

I love poetry, generally prefer poetry rich in metaphor and allusions, this set is more direct (though containing a number of nice mythological references)... But this slim volume is one of the most touching, sad and beautiful books I've ever read... I'll reread this a hundred times... and hope I find a love as deep.

Alive with beauty and emotion.......2001-01-12

In "Sorrow," Claribel Alegria has created poetry of great beauty and power. This is a bilingual edition, with each of Alegria's Spanish poems accompanied by Carolyn Forche's English translations. Forche has also written an introduction in which she explains how much of this book reflects Alegria's emotions over the death of her husband, Bud Flakoll.

Alegria's poems are emotionally raw, and graced with lyrical beauty and stunning imagery. Many of the poems in this collection revisit figures from Greek mythology: Ariadne, Circe, Sisyphus, and more. Particularly powerful is "The Reflections of Icarus," which re-imagines this character as a metaphor for poets. A number of other poems are short, haiku-like creations that examine both nature and the human world.

In the poem "This Is a Night of Shadows," Alegria writes, "My heart wishes / to burst with rage / but it sprouts wings." This memorable image is characteristic of her work. Alegria moves from tragedy to transcendence, and her work is rich in insight. This is an important volume by one of the great writers of Central America.

The transformation of grief ..........2000-05-11

All the poems in this collection grew out of the the poet's grief when she lost her husband. Her voice comes from a space deep within and is immediate. The grief and pain in all the poems is devastating and all-encompassing, but transformative. Her sadness and sense of loss colors every aspect of her life, but then shifts and dissipates, lifting her to another place in space and time. It was so refreshing to read a poet who so beautifully acknowledges and expresses deep emotion.

A beautiful sharing of love,grief, and hope.......2000-02-06

Claribel Alegria's SORROW uses simple, beautiful writing to communicate the feelings of love and loss that remain with her following the death of her husband. It will be a book I will share with friends when they must deal with the loss of loved ones. This is a simple, personal text that will speak to everyone.

SEARCHING FOR YOU/ I went out searching for you/ crossing valleys/ and mountains/ ploughing distant seas/ asking of the clouds/ and the wind your whereabouts/ it was all useless/ useless/ you were within me.

Joseph Wesner at Mid-Career
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Joseph Wesner at Mid-Career
Carolyn Forche, Robert B. Jacob, Kiichi Usui Gary D. Russi
Manufacturer: Meadow Brook Art Gallery
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0925859044

Authors:

Authors

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