SOURCE: "The Personal as Political," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 13, 1994, p. F.

[Salter Reynolds is the assistant book editor for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In the following essay, announcing that Forché is the recipient of the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, she praises the fragmented structure and style of The Angel of History as well as its focus on the "social" realm.]

When Carolyn Forché returned from El Salvador in 1980, where she had been working as a human rights activist, she wrote in her poem "Return": "I go mad, for example, / in the Safeway, at the many heads / of lettuce, papaya and sugar, pineapples / and coffee, especially the coffee. / And when I speak with American men, / there is some absence of recognition."

It may not have been the first time that Forché was witness to the kind of cruelty El Salvador became...