Visitations

Julia Alvarez returns to her first love, poetry, in her latest collection, with scintillating poems drawn from all the seasons of her life, from childhood to the years of silver.

“Visitations is a cause for celebration. The first book of poems by Julia Alvarez in over twenty years braids miracles and mourning, infused with the compassion that characterizes all the work of this resplendent writer.” —Martín Espada, National Book Award-winning author of Jailbreak of Sparrows

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 smells of sancocho and sofrito, the formative influence of her tías and her sisters, 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, visit the homes where she grew up and the homes where she grew into the formidable writer read in thousands of classrooms across America today. Her wisdom is as clear and beautiful as the light that shines through glass and yet grounded through the form and substance of self-knowing.

Told with a storyteller’s intimacy and the comfort of a warm hearth, this is a master writer’s reflection on family, aging, love, the body, having a voice, and the very act of composing 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.”

“Back in 1984 I met a book named Homecoming, which welcomed me in like no other. I did not know how homeless I was in the world of American letters till I came upon that collection. I immediately did something I never did: I wrote the writer a letter. The note, alas, never reached her. A lifetime has passed since its meandering. Let this serve as my long-lost missive. Julia Alvarez, you are first and foremost a poet, never more so than with Visitations. It is your own openhearted letter to your past and future selves. I am forever your fan.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of Woman Without Shame

“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

“Julia Alvarez recalls losing her voice ‘after a brief career / reciting poetry’ for her mother’s friends, but she confidently regains it here in these fierce, clear-eyed, bracingly honest poems that catapult us back into her past. Visitations is a book of narrative poems infused with lyrical moments, spots of time. So pull up a chair and listen to a master storyteller returning to her first love, poetry, and weaving her magic spell.”
—Edward Hirsch, author of My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy

“Visitations is a cause for celebration. The first book of poems by Julia Alvarez in over twenty years braids miracles and mourning, infused with the compassion that characterizes all the work of this resplendent writer. She recalls her declamation of memorized verse from a childhood in the Dominican Republic, as a dictator looms over the family and the nation. Later, Alvarez has a sacred encounter with a woman in Cuba possessed by poetry. The poet’s voice resonates when she must sing of grief; the most wrenching poem in the collection invokes the tragic loss of her sister, a rambling storyteller whose silence by death triggers guilt in the poet at her impatience. Likewise, a ‘visitation’ to a senior center brings Alvarez face-to-face with haunting visions of her mother. Yet, there are also visions of peace in rural Vermont, even as this poet of conscience refuses to forget the human beings denied peace in the rest of the world. The voice and the vision of Julia Alvarez gleam with the clarity of running water, the essence of life.”
—Martín Espada, National Book Award–winning author of Jailbreak of Sparrows

“Crisp and clear-eyed. . . . Alvarez is ever a poet of potent subtlety, whether dressing a dinner table with the succulent sounds of traditional dishes in Spanish . . . or depicting her father and his dingy doctor’s bag direct from the DR, struggling with English. . . . The highly anticipated poems are timely and perennially powerful.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“A vivid and arresting volume.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Radiant. . . . Her ability to inhabit earlier mindsets and re-create decades-old pivotal moments is astounding. . . . 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