Visitations: Poems

by Julia Alvarez

America’s beloved Julia Alvarez returns to her first form, poetry, in her latest collection, with scintillating poems drawn from across her life like stars from the sky

As I approach the closing stanzas of a long life practicing my craft, I feel the need to collect the many loose poems I've been writing into a book that follows the many incarnations and voices of my writing selves over the years. Each of the poems included here are visitations from writing selves of the past and present that still have something to say to me and, I hope, to my readers, Julia Alvarez tells us.

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 smell of sancocho and sofrito, tías and the sisters who forged her, 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, 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.

Told with a storyteller’s intimacy and the comfort of a warm hearth, here is a master writer’s reflection on family, aging, love, the body, having a voice, and the very act of 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 we arrive / where we were promised, belong to / what we longed for in ourselves, each other.”

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Family

112 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2026

About the author

Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. Her work has garnered wide recognition, including a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and inclusion in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling.

Photo copyright by Brandon Cruz González
EL VOCERO DE PUERTO RICO

Reviews

[Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visitations was my first experience reading Alvarez's work, and I think beginning here was an ideal introduction. As an autobiographical collection, it journeys through the memories, relationships, and moments that have shaped her life, making it easier to appreciate both the poet and her life behind the poems.

In a rather ironic move, I want to begin at the end of the book. The closing section, "Sobremesa," is a beautiful reflection on Alvarez's relationship with poetry, her love for the art form, and the process behind selecting the poems and choosing the collection's title. After reading it, I immediately wanted to return to the beginning, and I'm so glad I did! Understanding Alvarez's own reflections allowed me to better appreciate the intentionality behind both the poems themselves and the way they are arranged. Whenever I read poetry collections, I often become frustrated with the ones where I feel like I cannot understand how the individual poems come together to create something larger than the sum of their parts. Visitations is a beautiful example of how thoughtful organization can allow the reader to connectivity between the sections and the cohesion of the work as a whole. Alvarez's intentional construction worked wonderfully for moving through different moments of her life while emphasizing the thematic threads that weave together her story.

Thematically, the collection is steeped in nostalgia for a childhood and a past that can never truly be reclaimed. There is a sadness and longing woven throughout these poems that deeply affected me. Yet, Alvarez balances that grief with the beauty of childhood, capturing a young girl discovering both the world around her and her own sense of self. Many of the poems also reflect on family and the ways those relationships shape us. Alvarez explores how parents try to shield their children from painful realities while inevitably passing down their own traumas. She also considers how their choices influence our lives in ways they could never anticipate, and how sibling relationships become our first friendships, shaping our understanding of family, identity, and the roles we come to inhabit.

What I think will ultimately stay with me is the tenderness of the collection. There is so much love and care in the way Alvarez revisits her life. These poems do not simply recount memories, but rather they carefully shape them into a portrait of a life, preserving both its joys and its sorrows with extraordinary hauntings as the title suggests.

Thank you to the publisher, Knopf, for an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions shared in this review are my own!

[Maddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the ARC!

This was an intriguing and gripping story that I enjoyed learning about and connecting with! I have known about Alvarez for a while because of her works with In the Time of the Butterflies. This was very fun!

I think the formatting of the book threw me off a bit. But I enjoyed it!

[Veronica Flores · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful work by Julia Alvarez, as always. Thank you for inspiring me to open up my notebook and write a few poems of my own!

[andré crombie · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Late night I search for your house
in the dark valley below.
The children’s lights have long gone out,
and the lovers’ yearning hands have
touched the fond familiar spots
like grazing animals at dusk
returning to the glowing barn.

Clearly an uncollected compilation, and some of the longer narrative poems are not my cup of tea. But there are gemstones!

[Sherry Elmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

From "The Four Girls"

I
It has been a while since in the open space of a poem
I took a look at the myth of the four girls,

which we were raised in and which, like a brace
kept buckled long after the bones locked correctly

in their sockets, we have maintained
is a true myth—if there is such a thing—

long after we all moved away from
that four-headed, sixteen-limbed creature,

which has kept us each from the edge
of a sheer drop into ourselves.

And I bring it up here because a poem
allows us to look at a thing from all sides

at once: its open fields, its light
unmodulated by hollows or hills

flushes out the dark complications
so I am who I am here.

What I have to say to each of you
and to us, the four girls,

is a story of struggle to discover
and disentangle from that enmeshed mass,

known among us as the sisterhood,
the particular curl of my hair, the turn

of my chin, the unsure face on my face
as I climb up over the past

and fall to that loneliness
I've postponed by clinging to us.



I picked up Julia Alvarez's book of poems, Visitations, because I enjoyed reading an interview with her in Poet & Writer magazine, and because my most beloved friend is from a family of sisters. I particularly loved her heartbreaking poem "The Long And The Short Of It," and the poignant "Waiting For My Father To Pick Me Up At The Library."

August 2026

[Tamzen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've finally read a Julia Alvarez book, after meaning to for so long! Visitations was an excellent one to start with, too. This collection of poetry spans the life of Alvarez, childhood to present. Each poem is intimate and tells a story, and by the end of the collection, I felt like I kind of knew Alvarez a little bit. She puts herself directly into these poems, making them feel authentic and vibrant.

There were two poems specifically that I really felt, Ariadne In Bloomingdale's and part 2 of The Four Girls. And it made me think about how some people won't consume some media written by people of different races or genders or sexualities because they think they won't relate to it. Alvarez is 40 years older than me, is Dominican, has different life experiences, and yet we had the same interest in Greek mythology, and yet we value sisterhood, and yet plenty of other things. There are common threads woven throughout all writing, all movies, all media, and it's important to read a variety of authors and see how connected we all are.

In conclusion, I liked it!

Thank you to Knopf for the gifted copy!

[Carly Gillum · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautiful collection. VISITATIONS was my first collection of Alvarez’s poetry, but I’m excited to read more. This was poetry as memory, poetry as history, poetry as narrative, and it was really wonderful to read.

VISITATIONS to me, read like a diary - incredibly personal and heartfelt. This type of writing and memory is really something to aspire to.

Thank you to Knopf for the finished copy!

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Rooms Where the Words Survive
In “Visitations,” Julia Alvarez turns family memory, dictatorship, immigration, and sisterhood into a poetry of carried speech rather than performed inheritance.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 30th, 2026


A girl poised to recite at a lamplit canasta table becomes the book’s first and truest scene of audience – a domestic room where listening, secrecy, fear, and the survival of language gather in the same pool of light.

The first real audience for poetry in “Visitations” is not a classroom, a festival, or a shelf of prizes. It is a canasta table in Ciudad Trujillo. A little girl waits in a pink party dress to recite while her mother’s friends finish the last hand, gossip, keep one eye on danger, and set their faces for evening. Only later does she understand what, exactly, she saw. Not simply a parlor pageant. A roomful of women famished for what could not be said straight. They were, she realizes, “the perfect audience for poetry.” That delayed recognition provides the key to Julia Alvarez’s collection. “Visitations” is not merely a late book gathering its papers. It is a book about speech under watch – who is asked to perform, who is corrected into silence, who learns to listen, who carries words forward when official language cannot be trusted, and what poetry becomes once it is measured less by prestige than by use.

From a polite distance, the five-part sequence can look almost suspiciously orderly: Dominican childhood under Trujillo, immigration and American adolescence, the difficult weather of sisterhood, late love, then age, elegy, and a final prose coda. Alvarez is too shrewd to let the book sit there as tidy retrospection. Again and again she doubles back through patios, classrooms, libraries, shops, clinics, bedrooms, and kitchens to discover what those rooms were storing all along: state terror under table talk, shame inside ambition, dependence inside devotion, the long afterlife of public danger inside private habits. The subject beneath many of these poems is not memory alone but individuation without severance. How does a self become distinct without pretending it made itself? How do love, migration, class aspiration, political fear, and family myth make a person – and how does that person speak without merely repeating the voices that formed her?

The opening section comes in already carrying weight. It lays out the household set memory keeps rebuilding – sofrito, imported ices, Sunday meals, cousins on patios, taffeta and ribbons – and refuses to let nostalgia take over the room. Trujillo’s dictatorship arrives not as a historical lesson pasted onto family life but as domestic life schooled by fear: coded gossip, adult glances that check themselves halfway across a table, bodies trained to register danger before the mind names it. In “Balancing Acts,” the grandfather’s spoon tower is not only a charming trick. It is hope performed on a trembling tabletop. In “My Sister’s Restaurant,” a children’s game becomes apprenticeship, prophecy, and a lesson in listening. In “Erasing the Blackboards,” discipline, race, language, and belonging gather around the wish to wipe the slate clean. Childhood is the material here, but training is the point – recital, obedience, translation, feminine display, the early discovery that speech is always social before it is private.


In the cool geometry of the library, affection and embarrassment occupy the same threshold, and immigration becomes visible as a shift in scale between a daughter’s ascent and a father’s diminishment.

Part II is where the book begins to draw real blood. “Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library” is a father poem that refuses the prefab comforts such poems often borrow. The daughter waiting in the library does not merely miss her father or adore him. She sees him diminish in American scale. She sees old dignity become social awkwardness. She sees, too, that his diminishment opens the very space she will later occupy – the world of English, books, professional ease, institutional fluency – and that knowledge shames her even as it equips her. Immigration here is not a single passage from one country to another. It keeps happening wherever the self is cut down to size by another person’s gaze. “American Dreams” pulls a similar trick with candy in the mouth and grit under it, turning a sweet shop into a chamber of immigrant desire, bodily scrutiny, racial unrest, and American overabundance. Even “Ariadne in Bloomingdale’s,” with its mythic scaffolding and department-store gloss, refuses whimsy. Alvarez turns shopping into a mall-bright labyrinth – part class fantasy, part literary hunger, part underworld with escalators.

One of the quiet strengths of “Visitations” is that its sentences begin persuading before the ideas have fully announced themselves. Alvarez’s lines are clear enough to trust and alert enough to sting. Her clauses gather a scene, then tilt it, and suddenly a household object is carrying more than itself. Clocks, blackboards, bathrobes, party dresses, pantry lights – these are not props but pressure points. The diction prefers labor to posture. Spanish enters not as garnish but as memory’s working language. And the wit matters. It is quick, dry, sly, a little impatient with piety. Alvarez can be funny about family hierarchy, bodily indignity, social display, or literary ambition, which is one reason the darker knowledge here does not curdle into solemnity. The poems rarely kneel before their own emotion. They know better.

Compression is not Alvarez’s preferred instrument. She is, in these pages, a narrative poet with a novelist’s sense of accretion, and at her best that roomy cadence allows memory time to expose its hidden machinery. “Papi’s Clocks” needs its breadth: a father’s metaphor for his daughters gradually widens into a drama of translation, embarrassment, and belated tenderness. “At the Mental Health Clinic Waiting Room” does nearly the opposite. It works by clipped exposure, turning paperwork, dread, self-diagnosis, and inherited damage into a poem that sounds half like a joke and half like a plea. It also performs an important corrective in the collection. It reminds the book that the body is not only a vessel for memory, family, or nation. It is also waiting-room time, chemical weather, administrative language, the humiliations of interpretation. The cost of Alvarez’s lucidity is that some poems occasionally annotate what they have already made legible. At moments, she explains a poem’s wisdom just after the poem has already delivered it. The best work here does not need the extra nudge.


This clustered domestic interior renders sisterhood as Alvarez does – not as a tidy bond but as beauty, pressure, blur, and the difficult making of a self inside shared life.

Part III bears the roof’s weight. “The Four Girls,” the long sister sequence at its center, is where “Visitations” stops being merely supple and becomes necessary. Alvarez refuses both the hymn and the indictment. Sisterhood is glamour, refuge, comedy, rivalry, blood pact, blur. It is also pressure, merger, the difficulty of becoming singular without staging a false emancipation. The image of the sisters as “an enmeshed mass,” “a four-headed, sixteen-limbed creature,” is not just memorable. It names the book’s deepest problem. Beneath the migration story, beneath the family chronicle, beneath the soft afterglow of retrospect, “Visitations” is about how a self separates without disowning the voices and loyalties that made it possible. “The Four Girls” is not flawless. It runs a little long, and some of its broader statements are less charged than its intimate ones. Still, it changes the measure of the whole collection. After it, the book no longer reads simply as recollection. It reads as an argument about personhood.

Part IV, the late-love sequence, is impatient with literary manners in the best sense. Alvarez has no interest in pretending the body is twenty-five or that gratitude alone can sustain a poem. “Falling in Love in Late Fall” lets desire arrive already marked by age. “What Goes Wrong” turns plant care into a compact allegory of relational imbalance. “Amenorrhea” joins bodily silence to artistic fear with hard, clean force. Best of all is “Late Winter Walk,” in which one lover sees a hawk and the other a vulture. The poem is wise enough to leave both birds aloft. Love does not cancel dread. It gives dread company.


When a woman rises from the back of the room to reclaim a remembered poem, the hierarchy of literary importance quietly collapses and the book’s deepest idea about audience comes into view.

The decisive turn comes in “Muse Sighting in Matanzas.” Writers and scholars sit on a panel discussing the arts in Cuba. Then a woman at the back rises and asks for the floor. She is not there to decorate the occasion with local color or to ratify the event’s self-importance. She has carried a poem by heart and wants its words back. The scene quietly but decisively changes the room’s ladder of value. Literary prestige is not abolished. It is simply put back in its place. The panel becomes furniture. That reversal reaches backward through the whole collection. Suddenly the canasta table, the children’s restaurant, the family room, the waiting room, the kitchen, the sister-knot all belong to the same argument. Poetry is not most alive when it is most consecrated. It is most alive when somebody needs it.

That recognition gives the last section its force. “The Red Bathrobe” tracks, almost stealthily, what it means to grow older than the mother who once dressed your future from a distance. “Who to Ask?” understands family history as an archive with the labels fallen off. And “I Go Through the House Turning Off Lights” earns its place as the book’s final poem. Alvarez moves through a comfortable house after guests have gone, haunted by war footage, aid lines, departed family, and the ordinary work of dimming a home for sleep. No tidy moral victory. No handsome despair. The poem knows better than to pretend that private tenderness redeems public catastrophe. Instead it follows the speaker through darkness toward a beloved already asleep, toward “the spark of my joy.” The line lands because the poem has resisted grandstanding. Joy here is not innocence. It is stubbornness.


Moving through a house after guests have gone, this late nocturnal image holds grief, vigilance, and tenderness together, finding in the last warm lamp the stubborn spark the collection refuses to surrender.

“Sobremesa,” the prose coda, helps and then slightly overhelps. It explains the title, links the collection to recitation, Dominican political life, family memory, and the desire that poems might “quicken the life within us.” Much of this is illuminating. Yet it also arrives before the poems’ aftersound has fully done its work. The card table, the pretend restaurant, the sister-knot, the woman asking for the words – the book has already made its case in scenes with the doors left open. “Sobremesa” does not undo that work. It simply glosses it with more generosity than pressure.

That generosity is easier to forgive here than it would be in a colder collection. The poems have already earned trust. More important, Alvarez’s faith is not in poetry as a prestige object but in poetry as memorized need – speech that can keep a person going, language that survives hard weather. So “Visitations” reads less as topical response than as diagnosis in the old, unsensational sense. It understands authoritarian afterlives, immigrant shame, family role-play, loneliness, and public darkness without fussing to look current. It knows history does not wait politely outside. It gets into the house. It also knows that history does not survive only in monuments and official speech. Sometimes it survives in kitchens, jokes, snapshots, lines learned by heart.

So “Visitations” lands, for me, at 88/100 – 4 stars: stranger, firmer, and less decorous than its late-book poise first suggests, not quite severe or surprising enough to count as an unqualified triumph, but strongest exactly where the structure most needed to hold. What remains after the book is closed is not simply the fact of a well-known novelist returning to poetry. It is the quieter and rarer exchange the collection keeps honoring. Not the child on display. Not the panel. The women leaning in after cards. The sister listening across the pretend table. The woman at the back asking, simply, for the words. And somewhere down the hall, after the guests are gone and the lamps go out one by one, a spark still refusing extinction.


These early thumbnails test the painting’s real problem – how to arrange lamp, table, girl, and seated women so that the space between performance and listening becomes the image’s true subject.


The underdrawing reveals the architecture beneath the atmosphere, fixing the room’s balance of distance, exposure, and enclosure before color begins to trouble it.


With the first washes in place, the scene begins to divide into light and shadow, and the emotional weather of the room emerges before detail has fully declared itself.


This swatch sheet translates the book’s cover palette into the watercolor’s emotional logic, where warm lamplight and cool encroaching shadows carry memory, danger, and intimacy at once.

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

…what mattered was here
was the lover who lives for the mystery caught—
if we are lucky—in the lines of our poems.
from Muse Sighting in Matanzas by Julia Alvarez

I loved these poems that form a brief autobiography of the author’s life, starting with childhood memories, turning to the immigrant experience, flowering into the struggles of adulthood, love, marriage, the calling to be a poet. I read a few a night, savoring the stories they told that so moved me.

I adored the earliest poems. Discovering as a girl how poetry recited could move an audience, the power of word and song. The simple joy of a Sunday outing, choosing ice cream cones. Watching a beloved grandfather eating a mango, his enjoyment of the children at a time when “he struggles to keep a flicker of hope alive/like the window light that signals a safe house/for friends on the run from el Jefe’s policia.” Recalling the simple food at her sister’s restaurant; even power outages could not stop their enjoyment of a simple meal. The physical punishment at the American school, the prejudice that would not allow her to even clean the blackboards. Her mother at the vanity, putting on her face.

Then the poems turn to New York City, reading at the library, learning English, believing she had a better future here even while her father has been diminished. She dreams of abundant candy while “my new America was waking up/to a nightmare: freedom fighters marching…” Becoming a woman. Knowing her father was different. The eagerness to begin her new life, as a poet, independent.

Then, marriage with its disappointments. Thinking about her sisters, their shared past and divergences. Love in later life: “we were silent, holding hands/like children looking for a way/back to what was lost.” Menopause. Knowing “how love can turn.”

And with age comes wisdom, a better understanding of our parents, the mystery we can’t solve. Watching war and devastation from the safety of home, feeling powerless.

Did I say that I loved these poems? I love the way my chest slightly tightens, my heart aches whilw reading them. How Alvarez is known in them. How they connect.

I will revisit this slender volume.

My wish for this collection would be that at least one poem finds a fervent lover…In these times of encroaching darkness, may poetry provide the necessary spark of joy to keep us going. from Visitations by Julia Alvarez

Thanks to Knopf for a free book.

[2raccoonsinacoat · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Visitations” is a deeply personal, emotionally vivid collection that felt like being taken on a tour of Julia Alvarez’ inner world.

There are themes of family, identity (cultural and otherwise), love, and aging. Even though the poems are brief and absolutely accessible to readers of all levels, there are still deeper meanings to be found if you’re looking for them.

I felt such a strong sense of duality in this entire collection. These poems reward both casual reading for their beauty and closer attention for their deeper meanings. The translation does a wonderful job capturing Alvarez’ voice, but I would still be interested in doing a reread of the original Spanish version. What stood out to me most was Alvarez’s ability to hold reverence and struggle in the same space by honoring family, love, and identity while also acknowledging the tensions that run through them. Much of her writing is truly striking: ending a reflection on infertility with “The line stops here”, comparing the fickleness of romantic love to tending a jade – “My love, how shall I keep you safe from my love?”. I read poetry because I want to be helpless to feeling, then I want those feelings to echo. Alvarez does that in spades.

This is a wonderful collection for poetry readers of all levels, but especially those who enjoy emotional and pensive writing.

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Achor, and NetGalley for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley & Knopf for the ARC!

Julia Alvarez’s Visitations presents a life in montage, compiling uncollected poems from the past four decades of the poet’s life.

With such a deep well of poems to draw from, Visitations is in the unenviable position of finding coherence across the strain of time, but Alvarez smartly allows them to exist as momentary sketches in conversation with each other. Forms and subjects change, ranging from explicitly autobiographical (“The Four Girls”) to more broadly thematic (“First Marriage”), until it all coalesces into something near-mythical.

I would encourage prospective readers to begin with the closing “Sobremesa,” in which Alvarez identifies the oral tradition behind her work and articulates a hope that it might visit readers as a divine “visitation.” While there’s no denying the poet’s intrinsic strengths, I would argue that her work becomes much richer when viewed in conversation with her life and shifting relationship to language. A beach in the Dominican Republic is vastly different from the snow of Vermont’s Green Mountains, but they feel like natural parallels here.

Ultimately, Visitations is a quiet and unobtrusive collection, and that makes it one that will probably appeal most to people who are already familiar with Julia Alvarez’s work. Nevertheless, these dream-like poems tell a remarkable story of a life in retrospect, and that alone makes the book worth a read.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection reads like a memoir in verse, recounting the poet’s personal experiences, memories, and reflections in a loosely chronological assemblage of narrative poems. As such, some of the poems in the first section seem to lack focus; others sound prosaic. That said, Alvarez crafts mighty fine images and conveys deep emotional truths in poignant ways, particularly in Parts III and IV. Overall, perhaps a more traditional prose narrative, with full sentences and a coherent structure, would have been a more effective means of blending biographical facts with poetic imagery and creative license.

“. . . I saw myself
already changing shapes in my reflection,
becoming that nimble girl in the labyrinth
with a spool of thread and a road-map imagination.”
—from “Ariadne in Bloomingdale’s,” p. 29


“And I bring it up here because a poem
allows us to look at a thing from all sides

at once: its open fields, its light
unmodulated by hollows or hills

flushes out the dark complications
so I am who I am here.”
—from “The Four Girls,” p. 39


Favorite Poems:
“Mami at Her Vanity”
“American Dreams”
“Papi’s Clocks”
“Ariadne in Bloomingdale’s”
“The Four Girls”
“The Long and the Short of It”
“Falling in Love in Late Fall”
“Dream Girl”
“Late Winter Walk”
“The Red Bathrobe”
“Visitation”
“Who to Ask?”
“Muse Sighting in Matanzas”
“Sobremesa”

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite poems,
The Four Girls, part II. First half of poem:

There is power in groups of women-
covens, convents, coffee klatsches.
Think of women gathered together:
gossips washing clothes at the river,
girls giggling in a cluster at a social, grandmothers in housedresses crocheting poodle toilet-roll covers,
sewing quilts for the next generation of toddlers.

Somehow men together suggest slaughter
or drunks fumbling for lost car keys,
getting schnockered, as I read somewhere.
upchucking, fucking up, up to no good.

But women together want the radio on,
the windows opened, they want to hone
an idea down to insight with talk.
Perhaps, in the past, women together suggested a nest of weakness, a harem
to be trusted only to eunuchs.
But even with broken, bound feet,
or veiled. with children underfoot,
no matter how seemingly weak,
such womanly gatherings had the power
of transformation, so that it was always after the women arrived with pots, pans, prayer books,
brooms, bubblegum, and hula hoops
that a civilization got started.

Other poem that held onto me: Late Winter Walk.

[A Dreaming Bibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for providing me with an eARC.

This was a beautifully written poetry collection about the author's life from childhood to present. It feels raw with emotion talking about the difficulties of being an immigrant and making a place for yourself, to live in a war-torn country, the pain of forgetting your language, culture and roots in a new place. It's amazing how these are actually uncollected poems but actually feel intentional and perfect for this collection and flows coherently. My favorite poem was amenorrhea. It really resonated for some reason. I love free verse poems, it's just like reading a story but hits harder. I really loved the author's note where the importance of poetry in her culture and how that shaped her as a poet was elaborated on. It really increased the significance of this collection. I would recommend this to anyone who loves poetry.

[Melissa | honeybees_library · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Penguin Random House and Knopf for the free book.

Visitations: Poems by Julia Alvarez is a reflective and often intimate poetry collection that explores themes of identity, memory, spirituality, and the passage of time. Alvarez’s voice is thoughtful and deliberate, with many poems carrying a quiet, contemplative tone.

There are moments throughout the collection that feel vivid and meaningful, particularly when she leans into personal reflection and layered imagery. One standout for me was a poem called “Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library” that incorporates references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Some poems resonated and lingered, while others didn’t fully connect with me.

Overall, Visitations: Poems is a thoughtful and introspective collection with some standout moments, even if it didn’t completely captivate me from start to finish. It’s worth picking up if you enjoy reflective poetry with literary nods and deeper themes.

[Hannah Moenyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved this unique collection of poetry which works as both a memoir and a reflection on the poet’s life, as she looks back from the perspective of entering her 8th decade of life. The poems are organized more or less in chronological order by content, walking the reader through her life as a child in the Dominican Republic, coming of age in NYC, adult relationships, both romantic and with family, engaging with her internal life as well as the external world. Perhaps because I also come from a family of many sisters, I especially loved her long poem “The Four Girls”, that is both a love letter to each of her sisters as well as a love letter to the individual Julia that never knew who she was apart from her sisters. The closing essay is helpful in giving more context and getting a clearer picture into the author’s head at the time of publication.

[Paul (formerly known as Current) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book of poems, capturing the threads and metaphors that make up a life over time. Here is the loss of a place, of one world, and the capture and entanglement of a new one with a new language. Here is the problem of identity when you are one of four sisters, when you are socially circumscribed by your gender, when the world of your parents is lost in the modern. With age, you are at last able to truly look forward and look back, to see how the threads run, to re-evaluate things you did not understand or that changed in meaning over time. And here is also the continued reaching out to the strangers who are your readers with whom you share yourself, where you bring the visitation to them.

[StylesPlenty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetry collection by Julia Alvarez explores migration, identity, and womanhood. It honors the influence of tías and sisters while celebrating resilience, memory, and female artistic legacy. Through lyrical honesty, Alvarez reflects on learning English, healing, aging, love, and loss. This is ultimately showing how finding one’s voice connects to the enduring strength of women’s collective experience.

Thanks to Netgalley, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and Julia Alvarez for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Marlana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was gifted this book from Knopf and what a pleasant surprise to find a truly wonderful collection of poetry from Julia Alvarez. Throughout this collection, we jump through time, get glimpses into dining rooms filled with children, watch horrors unfold under dictatorship, and sit front row as our poet grows up. I loved reading this and will be returning to it as I grow through life.

Thank you Knopf for gifting me this book early to share my honest review. All reviews will be posted to my socials (Goodreads, Fable, Pagebound, IG).

[Rhiley Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Devastating. A book cased in mourning. Sometimes hard to read with the intensity of its grief, but worth it after every finished poem.
I loved a lot of poems, but found quite a few simply "okay". I still very much enjoyed myself, and would be interested to read more of Julia Alvarez's work!
A fantastic writer, with a longing to be seen and heard on the page. And that's exactly what she's done with this collection.

Thank you to NetGalley for the E-Arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Helina Reyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful poetry book! I did it as an audio book and I believe that if I read it I would go at a different pace and take it on better. Alvarez has become a favorite author for me with how she tells beautiful stories of my home. Making me transport back to my country and back in time with her stories.

It might mean more of you are from the Dominican Republic but there is still value in what writes and shares no mater where you are from.

[Alesa Bernat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first time reading Julia Alvarez. This collection had five sections of poems. The pieces were excellent in each section, but I enjoyed III and IV the best. I was drawn to the pieces about her sisters and the dynamics of a family displaced. Many of the poems had wonderful storytelling, offering visuals and metaphors that supported the narrative flawlessly. Alvarez points her lens at all the raw bits of life and captures them unflinchingly. I will be reading more of her work.

[Ambi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a stunning collection of poetry about Alvarez’s childhood in the Dominican Republic and her family’s immigration to New York while escaping a dictatorship. These poems were so raw and personal, yet done with a gentle and fine-tuned hand. This collection will stick with you.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC!

[Lorren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection almost felt like a memoir in verse. I don’t always love the more narrative-style poems, but I found Alvarez’s words deeply moving, especially the poems about her sisters. This is a great crossover collection for readers of memoir who want accessible poetry that well-crafted and has striking imagery.

[Andrea (Hammock and Read) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Julia starts with childhood in DR and moves through her life with these poems. We get identity, womanhood, learning English, moving to America, family, and love. These are really real life and raw poems, many will relate to these poems. This reads more like a memoir via poems, which is why I really enjoyed this collection especially since I listened to the audiobook.


thanks to prh audio

[Dorothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love her work so much and every book provides new insight, lush with emotion and beauty. One poem in particular moved me to tears. The Long and The Short Of It. So poignant. The beauty of love and the pain of self Awareness when a loved one is gone. It will break your heart. Thank you Julia, for once again inspiring and gracing my life with pure and unadorned truth.

[Kelly {SpaceOnTheBookcase] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spanning from birth to present day, Julia Alvarez used poetry to tell her story. Gripping and raw, I felt emotional from start to finish. Despite being a novella it packed a bunch, which is what I look for when I read poetry.

Thank you to Knopf for the gifted copy.

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure how to rate poetry, but this felt like a combination of short stories and poetry. Some of them were impactful, some of them fell flat. But I really enjoy Alvarez's point of view & prose.

Thank you to the publisher for the advanced copy!

[taylore · Rating 4 out of 5]

“i summon you out of history, sadness, out of imagination’s womb, the embrace of men and madness, come light the flickering spark of my purpose, heal the split atom, be who i am”

this book was a beautiful journey

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow loved this - im just on a roll with amazing reads lately - RTC