RON JACOBS applauds a reading of black history in the US that plots the path from autonomy to self-governance and then liberation
CAROLYN FORCHE’S What You Have Heard Is True (Allen Lane, £25) is an electrifying memoir in which the acclaimed US poet tells how she became an activist in El Salvador during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Forche’s was a trial by fire. She recounts how, as a 27- year-old poet and young teacher living in southern California, she became involved in El Salvador’s civil war through her contact with Leonel Gomez, nephew of Salvadorian poet Claribel Alegria.

A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin

LEO BOIX reviews a novella by Brazilian Ana Paula Maia, and poetry by Peruvian Giancarlo Huapaya, and Chilean Elvira Hernandez

LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro

LEO BOIX salutes the revelation that British art has always had a queer pulse, long before the term became cultural currency