Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
CAROLYN FORCHE’S What You Have Heard Is True (Allen Lane, £25) is an electrifying memoir in which the acclaimed US poet tells how she became an activist in El Salvador during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Forche’s was a trial by fire. She recounts how, as a 27- year-old poet and young teacher living in southern California, she became involved in El Salvador’s civil war through her contact with Leonel Gomez, nephew of Salvadorian poet Claribel Alegria.
A remarkable story of a woman’s radical act of empathy and her fateful encounter with the man who will eventually change her life and career as a poet, it starts in 1977, just a few months before the beginning of a 12-year civil war that would plunge El Salvador into one of the bloodiest and most violent conflicts in Latin America.

A novel by Argentinian Jorge Consiglio, a personal dictionary by Uruguayan Ida Vitale, and poetry by Mexican Homero Aridjis


