Looking back …

… A poet remembers her impulsive trip into a civil war. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Until the publication of this memoir, Forché’s experiences in El Salvador — seven “extended stays” between 1978 and 1980 — have mostly stayed distilled in her poetry. The Colonel, collected in The Country Between Us (1981), begins with an elegant dinner at a colonel’s home (rack of lamb, green mangoes) and ends with him emptying a grocery sack full of human ears onto the table — ghastly trophies from a dirty war.