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Event
Carolyn Forche: What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
KPFA Radio 94.1 FM presents
Carolyn Forché
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
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Tuesday, March 26, 7:30 PM
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley, CA
advance tickets: $12: brownpapertickets.com :: T: 800-838-3006 or Pegasus Books (3 sites), Moes, Books Inc (Berkeley), Walden Pond Bookstore, East Bay Books, Mrs. Dalloways $15 door, benefits KPFA Radio 94.1FM info: kpfa.org/events
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This luminous book stands beside the memoirs of Pablo Neruda and Czeslaw Milosz in its account of a poets education, the struggle of a great artist to be worthy of her gifts. Carolyn Forchés prose is shamanic: it sees both the surface of things and their inner workings, it animates the inanimate world. Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
Carolyn Forché is one of the most gifted poets of her generation. Her workincluding Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribeshas been translated into more than twenty languages. She has received the Windham-Campbell Prize and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. For decades, however, the story of how she became an activist through trial by fire has lived inside her until now. At last, in shimmering, gripping prose, we learn how a fateful encounter and a radical act of empathy changed the course of her life. Carolyn Forché was twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appeared on her doorstep a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it was brilliant. Shed heard rumors about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmerHe has driven from El Salvador to invite her to his country. Captivated, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension as 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. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads, sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship as she attempts to make sense of what shes experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. Forché learns how she can act as a witness and translate that into an art that might illumine the lives of others. That is the poetry of witness.
What You Have Heard Is True a riveting and essential account of a young womans political awakening is as beautiful as it is painful to read. Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
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LocationThe Hillside Club (View)
2286 Cedar St.,
Berkeley, CA 94709
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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