Nothing had prepared her for what followed. Gomez’s name was vaguely familiar to Forché: a friend, the daughter of expatriated Central American poet Claribel Alegria, had mentioned him the previous summer during conversations about political unrest in El Salvador. In the back of his car were his two young daughters. Then a man from El Salvador called Leonel Gomez knocked at her door. The only consistencies were menial labor and poetry, and, more recently, translating and teaching.” She was already an accomplished poet (her first collection won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition), but looking back, she sees that in her early work “there was no thread of purpose or commitment.” This story begins in 1977, when Forché was twenty-seven and “too young to have thought very much about the whole of my life, its shape and purpose. What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn ForchéĬarolyn Forché’s memoir What You Have Heard Is True is the story of her coming to consciousness as a poet and as a human rights activist.
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