Availability
Details
PUBLISHED
EDITION
DESCRIPTION
89 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN/ISSN
LANGUAGE
NOTES
"A Borzoi book"
I. Recitation -- On Sundays -- Balancing Acts -- My Sister's Restaurant -- Erasing the Blackboards -- Mami At Her Vanity -- II. Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library -- American Dreams -- Mami on Menses -- Papi's Clocks -- Ariadne in Bloomingdale's -- III. First Marriage -- At the Mental Health Clinic Waiting Room -- The Four Girls -- The Long and the Short of It -- IV. Falling in Love in Late Fall -- On a Hill Above Your House -- Dream Girl -- What Goes Wrong -- Amenorrhea -- Late Winter Walk -- V. The Red Bathrobe -- Visitation -- Who To Ask? -- Muse Sighting in Matanzas -- I Go Through the House, Turning Off Lights -- Sobremesa
"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, family and sofrito, tías and the sisters who forged her, her move to America and overcoming 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."-- Provided by publisher