What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

Name: What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
Price: 18.0 USD
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ISBN: 9780525560395

by Carolyn Forché

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2019 National Book Award Finalist

"Reading it will change you, perhaps forever." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time." --Margaret Atwood

What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.

Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.

Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.

Publisher:: Penguin Books
ISBN:: 9780525560395
Binding:: Paperback
Pages:: 400
Authors:: Carolyn Forché
Published Date:: 2020-02-11
Language:: English

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Carolyn Forché Documentary/Witness Poetics

About Carolyn Forché

Born in Detroit on April 28, 1950, Carolyn Forché studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from Newcastle University. A poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, she is the author of Gathering the Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets; The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1982); The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and In the Lateness of the World (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the American Book Award. She edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W. W. Norton, 1993). In 2017 she received a Windham-Campbell Prize. Forché serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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