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Zusatztext 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 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 fate.” —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 “Poets write the best memoirs, and Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard is True is no exception. A lyrical and pristinely disturbing recounting . . . no less stunning than her poetry—sharp, unsparing, and never looking away.” — Vox “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 sp...
