Gathering The Tribes

Gathering the Tribes was published in 1975 and is Carolyn Forché’s first poetry book. It is resolutely personal and recounts experiences of her adolescence and young adult life. The book won the 1975 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award when Forché was just 24 years old. In this collection, she explores the bonds of family, race, and sex. It also deals with the uprootedness she felt through the hasty emigrations from Czechoslovakia and Kiev her family endured, the loss of grandparents and other elders, and people leaving and being sent away. It is a book that needs to be read and re-read. Some of our favorites are “The Morning Baking,” “Burning The Tomato Worms,” and “Year At Mudstraw.”  Carolyn Forché will hosted by the Loveland Poet Laureate Program in Loveland on Friday, April 12th, and Saturday, April 13th. The weekend will include a reception, a reading by Carolyn Forché, and a conversation between Forché and Loveland’s Evan Oakley, Aims Community College professor, who worked with Forché on her ground-breaking anthology,  Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.