Carolyn Forché is one of the first and best practitioners of "the poetry of witness," a school of poets who use the form to record memories of war, famine, injustice, and every other rotten product of raw nature or human ambition. For the last 17 years, readers have had to content themselves with Forché's nonfiction, her translations, her anthologies, and her scholarship on the El Salvadoran peasant movement. But now she's finally out with In the Lateness of the World, a new collection of post-apocalyptic poems shot through with rays of hope. Sort of like Pound's Cantos filmed by Steven Spielberg with a little Jorie Graham thrown in there. If that means nothing to you, here's a pretty indicative line from a poem about a group of people walking across a bridge laid out over a deep chasm: "Below us bladder-wrack, sea-froth and dulse, / sea against rocks in heave and salt, and between / bridge and sea an abyss we cross, as behind us / the headland recedes — cottages and boats, clouds and sheep, / a piping of oystercatchers dying out, and the callings / of kittiwake preparing to leave their nesting ground." by Rich Smith