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Visitations: Poems
Not yet published
Expected 7 Apr 26America’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.”
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.”
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication April 26, 2026
58 people want to read
About the author
Julia Alvarez
95 books4,114 followersJulia 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
Photo copyright by Brandon Cruz González
EL VOCERO DE PUERTO RICO
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 8, 2026
wow loved this - im just on a roll with amazing reads lately - RTC
Displaying 1 of 1 review