THE CADENCE OF CONFLICT

was surprised, one day in 1977, to find a mysterious stranger at her door. The man had driven all the way from El Salvador to San Diego to see her. Civil war was coming to his country, and he wanted an American poet to bear witness. “Almost everyone I knew said, ‘This is not a good idea. This is not what poets do,’” she recalls. But she decided to go nevertheless. At 27, Forché was already, her first book, published the year before. , the best-selling collection that emerged from her time in El Salvador, cemented her status, resulting in prestigious awards and, she says, a spot on a federal watch list. Forché recounts her extraordinary adventures in a new memoir, , that took 15 years to complete and goes on sale March 19. “It wasn’t like writing poetry,” she says. “You have to go into a prose book and stay there. With poems, you can come in and out.”