The Other Side/El Otro Lado

"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.