If you have read one thing by Carolyn Forché, you have read "The Colonel," a contemporary masterpiece of a poem about a dinner she had with a Salvadoran colonel as the country was spiraling into a civil war. This new memoir takes as its title the opening line of that poem, which famously ends with the colonel dumping a bag of human ears on the table and dismissing the entire concept of human rights. "Some / of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the / ears on the floor were pressed to the ground," she writes. With What You Have Heard Is True, this early practitioner of the so-called "poetry of witness" school tells the full story of her trip to El Salvador, sparing no detail.