Violence
Forche is no stranger to violence. For years she devoted her career to traveling to war-entrenched places, locations of revolutions, prisons, etc. Her poems reflect her experiences by intention. To Forche violence is a part of society which must be addressed, so she spares no detail in describing the horrific, gruesome things that she's seen in her travels. These images range from wars to mutilated corpses to severed ears at the dinner table. Forche is credited with starting a movement called "Poetry of Witness," a term she invented. She was particularly talented at merging the personal and political spheres in her writing in a way which preserves the beauty of poetry and adds the sting of political commentary.
Death
After all of her travels, Forche is comfortable with death in her poems. She really never strays from the concept of death in any of her works because of either subject matter or motivation. Reading her poetry is like a guided meditation on death. In fact Forche pays the martyrs she witnessed great respect by not sensationalizing their deaths or the discovery of their corpses. She treats death as a familiar constant throughout her work, referring to it when appropriate and always considering it when talking about nature, whether social or biological. Consider these five poems: "The Boatman," "The Colonel," "The Memory of Elena," "Taking Off My Clothes," and "The Ghost of Heaven." Of the five only "Taking of My Clothes" makes no overt reference to death. However, "Taking Off My Clothes" is about a woman who is worried she's wasting her time on a man who doesn't deserve it. Her entire conflict is based around the fear of wasted time, the consequence of which is eventually death. Here again death is the motivation for Forche's characters.
Memory
Because of her approach to writing, Forche devotes much of her poetry to elaborated memory. She travelled all over the world in order to find the subjects of her poems, so much of her work was written in post. Even as a narrator, she's constantly concerned with recreating an experience. In an interview, Forche once talked about how her first collection of poems seems like it was written by a witness, but the second one was written by a critic. Her work develops over the course of her career so that her later poems demonstrate her ability to use memory as a tool in accomplishing other purposes. She sets a scene with explicit detail in order to highlight those moments of vagueness in which she's intentionally making her readers form their own conclusions. Writing in such a manner, she relies heavily upon the reader's faith in her own memory of real events as the poet.
