The Country Between Us
In the late nineteen seventies Carolyn Forche spent two years in El Salvador working with Archbishop Oscar Romero and human rights activists, and she came home with the poems that became The Country Between Us. The book, which won the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets, includes the celebrated prose poem The Colonel, in which a Salvadoran officer pours a bag of human ears onto the dinner table. Forche writes as a poet of witness, bringing state violence, exile, and moral responsibility into American poetry with unusual directness. The Country Between Us helped define a whole tradition of political poetry in English and has never gone out of print. It is a short, harrowing, essential volume.
What you might want to know about The Country Between Us
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Carolyn Forche's landmark collection of witness, drawing on the years she spent in El Salvador on the eve of civil war.
Yes. Coates has cited Carolyn Forche as one of the poets who shaped his sense of political witness and named The Country Between Us as a book he returns to when thinking about how to write about violence.
Yes, in the tradition Forche calls poetry of witness. It is grounded in her time in El Salvador and unflinching about state violence, though the poems remain lyric rather than polemical.
The Country Between Us was written by Carolyn Forche, published in 1981 by Harper Perennial.
The Country Between Us is 59 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Country Between Us takes most readers under an hour to finish.
The Country Between Us is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
