Barnhisel directs the Writing Center at the University of Southern California. In this essay, Barnhisel discusses Forché's poem in the context of her larger concern with war, violence, and the effects of brutality on humans and their surroundings.

Against the common stereotype that poetry restricts its subject matter to the individual psyche stands the work of Carolyn Forché, a poet who has relentlessly explored the vicious and violent history of the twentieth century in her poems. Winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award for her book Gathering the Tribes in 1976, Forché soon turned her focus away from the themes of family and descent that characterized that work. In 1978, Forché met Leonel Gomez Vides, the nephew of the El Salvadorian poet Claribel Alegria (whose work Forché was translating), and Vides prodded Forché to use her Guggenheim Fellowship money to come...