Review
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“One recovered incident, person, landscape, and
image at a time, the narrative advances, accruing tremendous
authority and emotional power. It as to almost a shamanistic
transmitting of Forché’s experience into our own…. What Leonel
Gómez was really offering when he lured her down to El Salvador
was the chance to become Carolyn Forché. Anyone who reads this
magnificent memoir will partake of that luminous
transformation.” — The New York Times Book Review
“Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time.” —Margaret
Atwood, via Twitter
“Extraordinary . . . What You Have Heard Is True challenges us as
Americans to see the people arriving at our border not only with
empathy but also with the knowledge that their arrival is a
manifestation of a shared history—of our shared e.” —Suzy
Hansen, The Nation
“Forché vividly evokes her complex relationship with her mentor
and with organizers, laborers, and religious leaders whose
courage in the face of atrocity taught her that ‘resistance to
oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves
that something better is possible.’” —The New Yorker
“Once Forché’s story gathers momentum, it’s hard to let the
narrative go…Riveting…intricate and surprising.” — The New York
Times
“Indispensable...unflinching...Forché offers up a vast human
landscape of terror, desperation and perseverance that stretches
far beyond mere borders. It’s more documentary than
self-portrait, more camera than mirror. Reading it will change
you, perhaps forever.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Gripping . . . ‘I could just as well write my poetry from the
quiet of my own study,’ Forché writes, ‘but I had known since
childhood that human suffering demanded a response, everywhere
and always.’ A portrait of the artist as political and poetic
ingenue, What You Have Heard Is True is just such a response, a
riveting account of how she made good on that conviction. It
bears eloquent witness to injustice and atrocity and to how
observing them shaped a fearless poet.” —The Washington Post
“Extraordinary . . . Written with a thriller writer’s knack for
narrative tension and a poet’s gorgeous sentences and empathy . .
. Though it took Forché half a lifetime to fully share what she
saw — this time is also more cryptically recalled in her second
book of poems, The Country Between Us(1982) — now is precisely
when we need to see it.” –NPR
“Her memoir traces her journey from political innocence to
experience, and, in doing so, offers a model to others who might
take the same journey . . . She remembers as much as possible,
and the resulting memoir, once read, is difficult to forget.” —
The Atlantic
"In [Forche's] poetry, and in her extraordinary memoir of the
period that would shape it, she demands an ethics of engagement
with the self, the state, language and its aesthetics. She
searches for humanity in each little grain of truth with
complete conviction and remarkable courage." — The New Statesman
“Carolyn Forché proves she’s just as talented a memoirist as she
is a poet in this enthralling read demonstrating the visceral
power of empathy.” — Paste
"A lyrical, potent book . . . Remarkable." —Los Angeles Times
“Why would a naïve 27-year-old American poet, who speaks Spanish
brokenly and knows nothing about the isthmus of the Americas,
accept the invitation of a near-stranger to join him in El
Salvador, on the brink of war? And why would this rumored lone
wolf/communist/CIA operative/world-class marksman/small-time
coffee farmer invite her? Those questions animate Forché’s
dramatic memoir about her transformation into an activist for
peace, justice, and human rights. Forché vividly recounts how she
became enmeshed with the mysterious, politically charged man and
with clergy and farmworkers as violence ensued, in a fierce
narrative punctuated with short prose poem vignettes that she
notes are ‘written in pencil.’ —The National Book Review
“In this galvanizing memoir, [Forché] recounts her political
awakening under fire with a poet’s lyrical acuity and a
storyteller’s drama…. Forché recounts her frightening and
transformative encounters with scorching specificity and portrays
her brilliant and courageous mentor and other resistance fighters
with wonder and gratitude. This clarion work of remembrance, this
indelible testimony to a horrific battle in the unending struggle
for human rights, justice, and peace, stands with the dispatches
of Isabel Allende, Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, and Elena
Poniatowska.” — Booklist, starred review
“In this searing, vital memoir, Carolyn Forché at last reveals
the dark stories behind her famous early poems: she brings alive
the brutality, complexity and idealism of El Salvador in the late
1970s, a time of revolution that echoes all too painfully in the
present. What You Have Heard Is True, a riveting and essential
account of a young woman’s political and human awakening, is as
beautiful as it is painful to read.” —Claire Messud, author of
The Burning Girl
“Carolyn Forché asks us not only to hear, but to see, the scale
of human and moral devastation in El Salvador. For those of us
who are citizens and residents of the United States, Forché’s
powerful, moving, and disturbing memoir also demands that we
recognize our country’s responsibility for the atrocities
committed by the El Salvadoran . As is the case with her
poetry, Forché’s nonfiction asserts the need for truth—in our
politics, in our writing, in our witnessing.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen,
author of The Sympathizer
“What You Have Heard Is True is as much an enthralling account of
a life marked by an encounter as it is a document of a time and
place. Carolyn Forche’s urgent and compelling memoir narrates her
role as witness in an especially explosive and precarious period
in El Salvador’s history. This incredible book shapes chaos into
accountability. It marries the attentive sensibility of a master
poet with the unflinching eyes of a human rights activist.”
—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
“Carolyn Forché’s beautifully rendered story of the and
often harrowing encounters that shaped her life is a testament to
her singular gifts as a poet of extraordinary courage and grace.
Forché does more than just bear witness to a world corrupted by
politics and violence; she listens and acts, and in doing so she
has created a work of art forged by her faith in language and
justice, a story that is haunting and indelible, urgent and
timeless.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
“This luminous book stands beside the memoirs of Pablo Neruda and
Czeslaw Milosz in its account of a poet’s education, the struggle
of a great artist to be worthy of her gifts. Carolyn Forché’s
prose is shamanic: it sees both the surface of things and their
inner workings, it animates the inanimate world.” —Garth
Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Carolyn Forché is a legendary poet, a great American voice of
conscience who has given courage to many of us for the past
several decades. Here, she shares with us what few writers ever
share: a story of how, by trial of fire at the beginning of the
horrific war in El Salvador, she found her voice. Both an account
of the education of a great contemporary writer, and a
spell-binding story of a journey and friendship, this book is
first and foremost a call to action. It asks us to pay attention
in a time of our own turmoil. It shows us just how to do what we
as a nation so desperately need to do: to remove the blindfold
and open our eyes.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
“Carolyn Forché, a poet renowned for her exposure of the
barbarisms in our time, has now given us the motivation for her
life-work. The book is right on time, though it took decades to
write. Now while we are creating a festering, wounded border in
America, and a pit of crime and cruelty, this book shows us how
such a thing happened, not from the US point of view, but through
the eyes of the oppressed. Forché has revived the role of a poet
in the modern world.” —Fanny Howe, author of Second Childhood
"Episode by episode, dodging death squads, Forché builds a story
filled with violence and intrigue worthy of Graham Greene around
which a river of blood flows—doing so, unstanched, with the avid
support of America's leaders." —Kirkus Reviews
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About the Author
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Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor,
translator, and activist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The
Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the
Tribes. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets
Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017,
she became one of the first two poets to receive the
Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at
Georgetown University. Forché lives in Maryland with her husband,
the photographer Harry Mattison.
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