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The New York Times Book Review has praised Julia Alvarez's fiction as "powerful...beautifullycaptures the threshold experience of the new immigrant where the past is not yet a memory and the futureremains 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 wonderfullysensual and funny love poems celebrating a middle-aged romance. The collection culminates in the twentyone-part title poem about the poet's return to her native Dominican Republic and the internal conflict andultimate affirmation that journey occasioned. Bold innovation and invention, the interplay of sound and sense, and the rhythm of two languages all characterize Julia Alvarez's art in transforming precious memory intounforgettable poetry.

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Library Journal Review

Alvarez (author of one of LJ's Best Books, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, LJ 5/1/91) writes poems as impressive as her fiction. In the opening sequence, writing of a loving maid and governess, she portrays with graceful simplicity the world of haves and have nots suggested in the duality we find in the title. Whereas poets from similar backgrounds-uprooted, mocked-write bitterly of the past and ambivalently of the future, Alvarez optimistically sets about "Making Up the Past." As the poems move from childhood memories to adult realities, they become less succinct, less headed toward closure. Lines stretch out. Anger enters. The setting of the long title sequence is ironic: at an artist's colony not far from her native town, the author suffers in the midst of a lengthy writer's block as she is joined by a lover she's not sure she loves. Yet she reaches out, in the final poem, not to all the people she might have been but toward the mute girl. Recommended for all poetry collections.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Widely known for her novels, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, Latina author Alvarez claims her authority as a poet with this collection. Tracing a lyrical journey through the landscape of immigrant life, these direct, reflective and often sensuous poems are grouped into five sections which, like the points of a star, indicate a circle. Alvarez begins with ``Bilingual Sestina,'' a meditation on leaving her native Dominican Republic for an alien land and strange language. She ends with the title poem ``The Other Side/El Otro Lado,'' a long, multipart narrative recounting her return to her homeland as a woman transformed‘translated‘by the years she has lived in America from native to guest. The speaker may claim ``There is nothing left to cry for,/ nothing left but the story/ of our family's grand adventure/ from one language to another,'' but this poetry resonates precisely because that story embodies larger questions about self-identity. A meticulous examination of self-evolution, Alvarez's assured collection reveals that change can take us across borders so slowly that only on reaching the other side can we see the distances we've come. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950 and was raised in the Dominican Republic. Before becoming a full-time writer, she traveled across the country with poetry-in-the-schools programs and then taught at the high school level and the college level. In 1991, she earned tenure at Middlebury College and published her first book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, which won the PEN Oakland/Jefferson Miles Award for excellence in 1991. Her other works include In the Time of the Butterflies, The Other Side of El Otro Lado, and Once upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA.

(Bowker Author Biography)