What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

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About What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir Of Witness

Product 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. Review One of New York Times' critic Jennifer Szalai's 10 Best Books of 2019A New York Times Notable BookOne 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 ow