Claribel Alegría was the daughter of a Nicaraguan rebel, a firebrand physician who was nearly killed by U.S. Marines for his opposition to his country's puppet government. She inherited a legacy of defiance, becoming a leading poet of suffering and anguish — a walking "cemetery," as she sometimes described herself, for the voices of people killed by Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and by the crossfire of Nicaragua's long-running civil war.