What You Have Heard Is True -- Carolyn Forche

As a young poet translating work into Spanish, Carolyn Forché couldn’t always understand the conditions from which the Salvadoran poems she translated arose. That changed when human rights activist Leonel Gomez Vides “removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.” This searing and unforgettable memoir, whose title comes from Forché’s frequently anthologized poem “The Colonel”, traces her experiences in El Salvador as a poet and human rights activist, through the publication of her collection The Country Between Us and the assassination of Archbishop Monsenor Oscar Romero.