Angel of History

“Poetry of consummate beauty . . . reminiscent of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’” from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

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

“A dark, richly textured, complicated work . . . [The Angel of History] is that great rarity, an altogether new thing.” —Liz Rosenberg, The Boston Globe

“The poignant cri de couer of this singular work must affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time.” —Robert Creeley, author of Life & Death

“I don’t think I have ever come across a poem of such length that is nevertheless so beautifully transparent and haunting.” —James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

“The Angel of History is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically ‘inevitable’ response to a half century of atrocities that has yet been written in English.” —Calvin Bedient, The Threepenny Review