"The New York Times Book Review" has 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. Bold
innovation and invention, the interplay of sound, sense, and the
rhythm of two languages, all characterize Julia Alvarez's art
in transforming precious memory into unforgettable poetry.
