What You Have Heard Is True

Produktbeschreibung

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. 

Kritik

One of New York Times' critic Jennifer Szalai's 10 Best Books of 2019

A New York Times Notable Book

One of Electric Literature's 15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019

One recovered incident, person, landscape, and image at a time, the narrative advances, accruing tremendous authority and emotional power. It amounts to almost a shamanistic transmitting of Forch‚ s experience into our own . What Leonel G¢mez was really offering when he lured her down to El Salvador was the chance to become Carolyn Forch‚. Anyone who reads this magnificent memoir will partake of that luminous transformation. ÿ The New York Times Book Reviewÿ

Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time. ÿ Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

Extraordinary . . . What You Have Heard Is Trueÿchallenges 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 fate. Suzy Hansen, The Nation

Forch‚ 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 Forch‚ s story gathers momentum, it s hard to let the narrative go Riveting intricate and surprising. ÿThe New York Times
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Poets write the best memoirs, and Carolyn Forch‚ sÿWhat You Have Heard is Trueÿis no exception.ÿA lyrical and pristinely disturbing recounting . . . no less stunning than her poetry sharp, unsparing, and never looking away. Vox

Indispensable...unflinching...Forch‚ 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, Forch‚ 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 Forch‚ half a lifetime to fully share what she saw this time is also more cryptically recalled in her second book of poems,ÿThe Country Between Us(1982) now is precisely when we need to see it. NPR
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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 completeÿconviction and remarkable courage." The New Statesmanÿ

Carolyn Forch‚ 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."ÿ Los Angeles Times

Why would a na‹ve 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 Forch‚ s dramatic memoir about her transformation into an activist for peace, justice, and human rights. Forch‚ 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, [Forch‚] recounts her political awakening under fire with a poet s lyrical acuity and a storyteller s drama . Forch‚ 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,  

Autoreninfo

Carolyn Forché