![]() "Museo del Hombre": the closing line - Become the one you have been waiting for. I've included some samples - not the poems in their entirety - from some of my favorites from this collection below. This is one I will definitely be referring back to in years to come, and I am curious to see, as I read some of Alvarez's novels, where connections can be made between her writings within the two genres. Not every poem was an absolute hit for me - I didn't entirely connect with "Anger & Art", for instance - but that didn't diminish my enjoyment of the collection one bit. Choosing not to linger with the negative moments, she instead focuses on finding love again later in life, writing poems of gratitude for all that life has taught her - about herself, her family, her roots, even her connections with the natural world. Briefly she writes of the doubts she had about herself during that time, questioning whether or not she understood love. She also gets real about her adult years, with poems that only give a whispering reference to a failed marriage and what that taught her. I couldn't keep the southern continent out of the northern vista of my eyes." "Long after I'd lost my heavy accent, my face showed I had come from somewhere else. The poems speaking on this also give a nod of pride and respect to her parents who seemed to remain solid and vigilant, their everyday actions promoting perseverance through adversity, even as young Julia would watch them falter and rebuild time and time again. She speaks of the struggles of trying to find her space in the world as a Dominican child being transplanted to New York City. It's hard for me to know where to start when reviewing a collection of poetry, but I guess I start with saying that I found these poems to be absolutely gorgeous, even when talking about not-so-pretty topics! As one might guess from the title, these poems cover the span of Alvarez's life up to the time of this collection being written. ![]() Here, in the middle of her life, she looks back as a way of understanding and celebrating the woman she has become. In these seventy-five autobiographical poems, Alvarez’s clear voice sings out in every line. They have shaped her writing just as they have shaped her life. ‘Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic’Īlice Quinn, editor Alfred A.The works of this award-winning poet and novelist are rich with the language and influences of two cultures: those of the Dominican Republic of her childhood and the America of her youth and adulthood. What if this poem is the vaccine already working inside you? Listen to nightingales singing on the boughs of odes – Will poems be the only safe spaces where we can gather together: Will it help build up antibodies against indifference? Will we undertake odysseys searching for Ithacas inside us? Will poems be our preferred form of travel? Will there be enough poetry to go around? ![]() Will these hexameters be heroic like Homer’s? The Friday Poem selection for this week is Julia Alvarez’s ‘How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry?’ As we reimagine our priorities ‘after’, framed by our experience in the ‘before times’ and pandemic isolation, where will art reside? One expression of this “narrative fabric” is the recently published poetry anthology, ‘Together in a Sudden Strangeness’ edited by Alice Quinn. ![]() ![]() “We are going to need this narrative fabric, some sort of fabric for us to lay down once we overcome this.” She spoke of the writer’s responsibility, “whether a science-fiction writer, a journalist, a poet, each at their own pace and within their own capacities, to document this moment”. Last spring, author Valeria Luiselli accepted the British Rathbone Folio Prize for her novel, ‘Lost Children Archive’. ![]()
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