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Your next favorite book
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America's beloved Julia Alvarez returns to her first form, poetry, in her latest collection, with scintillating poems drawn from across her life like stars from the sky.
As I approach the closing stanzas of a long life practicing my craft, I feel the need to collect the many loose poems I've been writing into a book that follows the many incarnations and voices of my writing selves over the years. Each of the poems included here are visitations from writing selves of the past and present that still have something to say to me and, I hope, to my readers, Julia Alvarez tells us.
In these poems, Alvarez traces her life gently, a fingertip following lines on a page, through memories of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, a dictatorship dramatically survived, the smell of sancocho and sofrito, tías and the sisters who forged her, her move to America and the challenges of learning English, the search for mental health and beauty, redemption, and success. We meet her grandchild and her mother, her lovers, and the homes where she grew up and into the formidable writer read in thousands of classrooms across America today. In these poems, her wisdom is as clear and beautiful as the light that shines through crystal, and yet grounded through form and the substance of self-knowing.
Told with a storyteller's intimacy and the comfort of a warm hearth, here is a master writer's reflection on family, aging, love, the body, having a voice, and the very act of poetry itself, experienced across the arc of decades—a collection of searching for an artistic voice, for the author's very essence, until "the way it sometimes happens: we arrive / where we were promised, belong to / what we longed for in ourselves, each other."
"In her prismatic fourth collection, novelist, memoirist, and poet Alvarez (The Woman I Kept to Myself) spins richly detailed micro-narratives of her childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s, her young adulthood in New York City, and beyond." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With its vivid scenes and alliterative phrasing, this gorgeous collection presents food and family, memory and companionship, as talismans to hold against the darkness." —Shelf Awareness
"In Visitations, Julia Alvarez conjures the spirits that haunt our histories with luminous precision. These poems traverse the geography of displacement and enact the intimate kinship of sisters in lines bound by myth. Alvarez's latest work pulses with political urgency and personal archaeology bearing the sacred charge of language as memory's mirror. This collection is a masterpiece of reclamation from one of our most essential voices." —Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder
"From babyhood to old age, from the old country to the new country, the killer dictators chase us. Terror. Horror. And yet ... And yet ... A spark of joy. A muse. Spirit. A visitation. Gracias, Sister Julia." —Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior
This information about Visitations was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brandon Cruz González/EL VOCERO DE PUERTO RICO
Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960, at the age of ten. She is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including her beloved first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and In the Time of the Butterflies, which was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its Big Read program. She was the subject of an American Masters documentary, Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined, on PBS and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. She lives in Vermont.
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