![]() Of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water ………….The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries ![]() The poem’s power lies in the quick juxtaposition of quotidian details - the colonel’s daughter filing her nails, a cop show playing on TV, mangoes being served - with his sudden sadistic flourish: I was in his house.” So begins one of the most famous poems of the late twentieth century, Carolyn Forché’s “ The Colonel,” which was part of an early body of work that seemed to contemporary admirers as if it had “ reinvent the political lyric at a moment of profound depoliticization.” The poem describes a meeting Forché had with a Salvadoran military leader in his home in 1978, a year before the coup that sparked that country’s extraordinarily brutal civil war, which lasted for more than twelve years. Melissa Batchelor Warnke | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,668 words) ![]() ![]() Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. ![]()
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