Carolyn Forché Books

Dirty Sally
I bought this book for my oldest daughter but it offered so much more for her. I can't stand it when someone makes an ignorant comment about how different my children look. Our family is very diverse and we are always faced with justifying our ethnic legitimacy. If I hear, "She's cute to be dark" one more time. I don't know what I will do. This book is very encouraging for children all over the world who feel like they are "different". Oftentimes, biracial children pose that heartbreaking question, "why was I born?" in Colors come from God ...just like me, the author does an excellent job making those who are different feel validated. "God made my goldfish swim round and round, And God made me a beautiful brown". God made us all beautiful, just the way we are and I commend Mrs. Forche for helping young people to achieve self worth through biblical scriptures. I highly recommend this book.
I am an author myself and I have written a book entitled Dirty Sally...The untold stories of mixed race children who find a new identity, love, faith and forgiveness through God. This Christian based children's book seeks to raise awareness within the bi-racial community. Allegorical tales detail the unspoken realities facing multiracial children, and encourage young readers on how they might make better choices by referring to biblical scripture as a teaching tool. I am also available on Amazon.com. Thank you for your support. God Bless
Myrtice J. Edwards
For more information or to contact the author, Myrtice J. Edwards visit
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My family is blended, my husband and I are white. We have 2 biological kids and two adopted African-American kids. We need bridges between two different looks, this book helped. Also, great for families who are African-American and families who are white or Asian or whatever. Starts discussion with kids about skin color and what it does or doesn't mean. Does it in a spiritual, not religious way.

Carolyn Forche's book for children has a message that all adults need to learn. This wonderful book should be shared with every child with every parent.

In rhythmical verse that children will love, Carolyn celebrates the variety of God's creation.

The book captures the feeling we all should have for one another.

The illustrations in the book make it a work of art.

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!

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.

Great book. I'd recommend it to anyone who want to write interesting free flowing articles be it stories or anything. This book offers you with knowledge you'd need to write a good essay, story or book. I love this book it has really helped me improve my writing skills. Writing Creative Nonfiction

The book was well known before I ordered it. It is all I looked for and it is on my principal bookshelf.

This book may not be 100% comprehensive (a tad redundant, perhaps), but if there is any other one out there that has more to offer on addressing the varieties of style, structure, form and the creative nonfiction process, I haven't seen it. Being new to the business in 2003 when I began working on Waiting for Westmoreland in earnest, I found the instuctions and insights illuminating, inspiring and confusing all at once. How to choose?! I felt like Alice on her journey after the rabbit. Still, it gave me plenty of techniques to consider--that would not have been as readily discernible had I simply tried to read every book of actual creative nonfiction I could get my hands on.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

In this age of information, poetry is perhaps the most efficient method of expressing grand concepts. Language for a New Century, a collection of contemporary poetry from the Middle East, Asia (including parts of North and East Africa) and its Diaspora, contains one poetic masterpiece after another. Complete with humor, love, anger, despair, confusion, contempt, sadness and joy, the poems open a window into the experience of the world's most populous continent. Lovingly compiled by its editors, who are towering artists in their own right, this collection of 400 voices from the "East" is the culmination of six years of research and collaboration with thousands of people in the 55 countries from which the works are drawn.

The poems were carefully translated from their 40 original languages into English--many for the first time--by expert regional artists who have succeeded in expressing concepts and ideas often difficult to convey. The poems contained in this massive volume represent some of the best in their modern craft, and stand in stark contrast to the disposable monotony we slog through in our daily search for truth. Evocative and provocative, familiar and shocking, the poets pose questions more often than they make pronouncements. Eliciting thought and reflection, they challenge the consumer of "information" to instead become an information producer.

Arranged around nine themes related to the human experience, the structure of the book itself combats Orientalism with humanity. It defies borders, many artificial, many imposed, reconnecting regions in a continent where, prior to Western imperialism, war and the modern nation state, identities, ideas and people interacted more fluidly. Events that have transpired in these regions over the past six years have only made the poems' messages more urgent--and their publication that much more of a triumph. Indeed, Language for a New Century, and the regional networks developed through the work of its tireless collaborators, is likely to bring on a new age of enlightenment; if not for the world, then at least for the reader.

Published in the September/October 2008 Issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

The presentation gives a fairly complete rendition
of poetry from the Middle East and Asia. Renditions
from Azerbaijan, Turkey, India, Iran, Japan,
Palestine and Iceland are provided for the readers'
enjoyment. Tidbits of typical poems are provided
together with the applicable authors. i.e.

Jennifer Dobbys-Elesy wrote "Pure Music" which contains
the following passage:

" Child among night flowers , opening their dark eyes
to the moon , "

Hamid Ismailov wrote "The Shaping Clay" containing the
following passage:

"Crack open your door, silence to the murmurs of a
cottage under the cradle of the sleeping clay."

Kyimay Kaung wrote "Eskimo Paradise" containing the
following passage:

" Eskimo paradise is warm paradise of Bedouins cold-
my paradise. "

LANGUAGE FOR A NEW CENTURY: CONTEMPORARY POETRY FROM THE MIDDLE EAST, ASIA AND BEYOND provides an unprecedented collection of poetry from the East, blending and presenting works by Middle Eastern and Asian writers. Some 400 poets are featured here, selecting poets whose works represent a wider artistic movement in the East. It's a literary anthology no college-level collection should be without.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

"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.

"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.

Perhaps the most underrated, overlooked poet ever, Desnos' work is not only superior to the Frost/Coleridge/etc. you read in high school, but is also infinitely greater than that of Breton and the other surrealists, establishing the modern paradigm of poetic imagination. No other poet really comes close, except for the great Jeremy Reed (try Red-Haired Android to see what I mean). Warm, humane, and oh-so-brilliant, Desnos' poetry is absolutely, endlessly, mind-alteringly fascinating. Kudos to Carolyn Forche and William Kulik for bringing his work in such a fully-realized form to this side of the Atlantic.

A great collection of translations from one of the best surrealist poets. A well presented book with a intriguing introduction.

funky and astute might be appropriate adjectives to describe Open City mag., which is more than a literary portrait "of New York City and the city in general." with writing not merely urban(e) or cynical (consider the dense, nature-themed poetry of Rodney Jack and the quirky yet illuminating work of Catherine Bowman in #18), here is the intelligentsia--artful and heartfelt, in a format as original as the visions it collects.

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.

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.

Great book. Absolutely great.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.