✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Colonel by Carolyn Forché | Poetry Foundation

poetryfoundation.org · 386 words · saved by 1 readers

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, remains a tender but fiery call for revolution. Carolyn Forché discusses her memoir of the same title, about her time in pre-civil war El Salvador in the late 1970s. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review, Forché’s ability to...

Share WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table fo

Explore this link on the map →

related reading