The Forgotten World

Product Description

“A bold and daring approach that arises from the innate need to acknowledge privilege and play a part in moving humanity forward, 
The Forgotten World strives to remind readers of the inherent and deep-seated struggles of navigating global citizenship in an unfathomably, beautifully complex world.” —
Independent Book Review

In his third collection, poet Nick Courtright explores the world at large in an effort to reconcile selfhood as an American in the international community, while also seeking anchors for remembering a wider world often lost to view in our shared though increasingly isolated experience of reality.

Beginning in Africa with investigations of religion and love,
The Forgotten World then moves to Latin America to tackle colonialism and whiteness. From there it travels to Asia to discuss economic stratification and Europe to explore art and mental health, culminating in a stirring homecoming to troubled America, where family, the future, and what matters most rise to the forefront of consideration.

Through all of it, Courtright displays a deft hand, at once pained, at once bright, to discover that although the wider world seems farther away than before, the lessons it offers are more needed than ever.

Review

Nick Courtright has not forgotten the world. In his poems, what tethers and separates us is visible. His language is graceful, self-aware, and highly memorable.
~ Eduardo C. Corral, author of 
Guillotine and 
Slow Lightning
 
Nick Courtright’s 
The Forgotten World begins with a “heritage like gum on a Walmart parking lot” and searches for a relationship with the world–what part of nature is a father, what purchase gives them a brother. In these poems the speaker, forever elsewhere, quests for a sense of self, for anew definition of family, for a fire that might make everything begin again.
~ Traci Brimhall, author of 
Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod and 
Saudade
 
These are poems that reach for elusive truths, as their speaker seeks to understand his place inside the world, inside whiteness, inside the magnitude of empire, inside the complexities of the human spirit. It’s a search that resists the comfortable answers and leads readers to a space of restless astonishments.
~ Matthew Olzmann, author of 
Contradictions in the Design and 
Mezzanines
 

The Forgotten World is a terrific book with a surprisingly wide range: it explores the world, the home, and the soul with honesty, dark humor, and love. In myriad landscapes and poetic forms, Nick Courtright skillfully depicts the complexities of balance and collapse–both the personal and universal–the past’s and the ever-impending.
~ Jennifer L. Knox, author of 
Crushing It and 
Days of Shame & Failure
 
In 
The Forgotten World, Nick Courtright explores the intersections of being a citizen of one country and the desire to live as a citizen of the world. It is a challenge, however, to embrace all and be embraced by all. What we find in these poems is keen observation of human interaction, an attempt to understand the world most us die not knowing, and the realization that most of us will remain mere tourists in this world, often nothing more than “beggars reaching for the cup of sadness.”
~ Octavio Quintanilla, author of 
If I Go Missing and2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio
 
In 
The Forgotten World, Nick Courtright weaves a challenging and unflinching exploration of nearness and distance, “the unmasked faces of others,” and the temporary nature of the self. It’s a journey of questioning, of the subject position of the speaker, as outsider and participant, as well as of the reader, in the face of cultural implication and personal atonement. It’s not a safe journey or book, but one we need to remember.
~ John Gallaher, author of 
Brand New Spacesuit and 
In a Landscape
 
Structured like a travelogue, the speakers of 
The Forgotten World are ever aware of their fraught and fragile relationships to the people and places a