Carolyn Forché’s Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems 1976–2026, Explored in Essay Published by Poetry Magazine
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El Salvador, 1989. Photo by Luis Romero. Courtesy Associated Press.
On September 8th, 2026, Poetry Magazine published an essay by Federico Perelmuter on Carolyn Forché’s latest poetry collection, Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems 1976–2026.
From “Alive at the End”
“There is no other way to say this,” Carolyn Forché writes in her prose poem “The Colonel,” dated May 1978, which concerns a military man who “returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves.” That poem, undoubtedly Forché’s most famous, lingers on the colonel’s family and their mundane routines: “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night . . . On the television was a cop show. It was in English.” Of course, the evening takes a sinister turn, a frank display of a power that believes itself impervious: “I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves.” The whole poem is shocking and blunt, bearing witness to the time Forché spent in El Salvador between 1978 and 1980 as the country tumbled toward civil war amid escalating political violence carried out by the military, security forces, and right-wing death squads against their own impoverished rural and indigenous population.
We apprehend the facticity of the poem’s narrative—and it is a narrative, however minimal—in its opening, a paradoxical and ironic inversion of the temporal relation between testimony and event, poem and subject matter: “What you have heard is true.” That direct address places us in the borderland of rumor, acknowledging the infamy of figures like “The Colonel” while affirming the speaker’s veracity and positioning her not exclusively in the lyric mode but also in the registers of documentary and reportage. At the same time, we are in the present perfect of “have heard,” surrounded by the transcendent continuity of a great chain of horrors that may or may not continue to exist or be recorded. The speaker, an American abroad, at once praises and undermines her own role as communicator or truth-teller. By the end, we encounter the ironic re-inversion in the killer’s voice: “He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.” The severed ears come alive in a final act of betrayal to their maker. And for whose poetry is this scene, if that is what the colonel is saying? Who’s you? To what ground are these ears pressed? To whom does this poem belong?