The Angel of History - by Carolyn Forche (Paperback)

About the Book

New from award-winning poet Carolyn Forche is The Angel of History. Placed in the context of 20th century moral disasters, these poems are a meditation on memory and a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable.

From the Back Cover

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious 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, Forche attempts to give voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

Review Quotes

"A dark, richly textured, complicated world...that great rarity, an altogether new thing." - Boston Globe
"A difficult book to put down, or to forget...Forche proves once again that socially conscious poetry is not a contradiction in terms." - Review of Books