What You Have Heard is True

What You Have Heard is True PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher:
ISBN: 0525560378
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.

What You Have Heard is True

What You Have Heard is True PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher:
ISBN: 0525560378
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book

Book Description
Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.

What You Have Heard Is True

What You Have Heard Is True PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525560386
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
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.

What You Have Heard Is True

What You Have Heard Is True PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141991135
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Carolyn Forché is 27 when a mysterious stranger calling himself Leonel appears on her doorstep, having driven direct from El Salvador. A friend has heard rumours about who he might be - a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer - but nobody seems to know for certain. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts his invitation to visit and learn about his country, and becomes enmeshed in the early stages of a civil war which will see a state turn death squads on its own people and over 100,000 dead. Told across peasant shanties, retired generals' grand homes, protest marches and safe houses on the run, this is the powerful true story of a woman's radical act of empathy and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who will change the course of her life.

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001

Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393347664
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

The Country Between Us

The Country Between Us PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780373751
Category : POETRY
Languages : en
Pages : 59

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Book Description
Carolyn Forché's The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand. By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forché to return home, asking her to talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us and convince them to stop the military aid. A week later Archbishop Romero was assassinated. Back in the US, Forché gave readings and talks about US-backed oppression in Central America, but found publishers and critics uncomfortable with the startlingly different poems of this second collection of poems relating to torture, murder, injustice and trauma.

Blue Hour

Blue Hour PDF Author: Carolyn Forche
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062004239
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Book Description
"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth,' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour,' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted. "The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence." -- Robert Boyers

In the Lateness of the World

In the Lateness of the World PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525560408
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY “An undisputed literary event.” —NPR “History—with its construction and its destruction—is at the heart of In the Lateness of the World. . . . In [it] one feels the poet cresting a wave—a new wave that will crash onto new lands and unexplored territories.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another. Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.

The Angel of History

The Angel of History PDF Author: Carolyn Forche
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062029061
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitious and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forche attempts to give voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

What About Those Who Have Never Heard?

What About Those Who Have Never Heard? PDF Author: Gabriel J. Fackre
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 9780830877645
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Ronald H. Nash, Gabriel Fackre and John Sanders offer three evangelical views on the destiny of the unevangelized.

Gathering the Tribes

Gathering the Tribes PDF Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300019858
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description
Speaks of personal Slavic origins, the culture of American Indians, racial bonds, and other topics related to themes of kinship and self-identity