Poems
by Julia Alvarez
(New York: Dutton, 1995)
Julia Alvarez has won enormous acclaim for her fiction, which includes How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,winner of the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and In the Time of the Butterflies,nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award. But long before Alvarez discovered her novelist's voice, she was producing inspired and engaging poetry that helped launch one of the most vital movements in contemporary American letters: Latina literature. The poems in The Other Side/El Otro Lado,collected here for the first time, reveal Alvarez's mature voice and the full range of her poetic gift.
The New York Times Book Reviewhas praised Alvarez's fiction as "powerful ... beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant where the past is not yet a memory and the future remains an anxious dream." These same qualities characterize her poetry from the "Making Up the Past" poems, which explore a life of exile as lived by a young girl, to "The Joe Poems," a series of wonderfully sensual and funny love poems celebrating a middle-aged romance. The collection culminates in the twenty-one-part title poem about the poet's return to her native Dominican Republic and the internal conflict and ultimate affirmation that journey occasioned. A final poem, "Estele," addressed to a mute Dominican child, stands as a magnificent coda to the themes that give this collection, so varied in style and tone, its compelling unity.
Writing with a mastery of traditional forms coupled with a bold innovation and invention, attuned to the interplay of sound, sense, and the rhythm of two languages, Julia Alvarez here employs all the alchemy of her art to transform precious memory into unforgettable poetry.
Lucid.... Written with a novelist's sense of narrative and place, these poems forge ahead in language as plain and palpable as thick Caribbean light.... an affecting and genuine exploration laced with wisdom and humor... Alvarez maps out the heart's ongoing journey ... and the thin, precarious bridges we build from country to country, from silence, from childhood to whatever place we invent for ourselves in the world."
-Miami Herald
"Tracing a lyrical journey through the landscape of immigrant life, these direct, reflective, and often sensuous poems ... take us across borders so slowly that only on reaching the other side can we see the distances we've come.... Meticulous ... assured ... Alvarez claims her authority as a poet with this collection."
-Publishers Weekly
"Playful and profound."
-San Francisco Chronicle Book Review