Homecoming is Alvarez's first published collection of poetry, a work of great subtlety and power in which the young poet returned to her old-world childhood in the Dominican Republic. Now this revised and expanded edition adds thirteen new poems.
Long before her award winning novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez was writing poetry that gave a distinctive voice to the Latina woman and helped give to American letters a vibrant new literary form. These more recent writings are still deeply autobiographical in nature, but written with the edgier, more knowing tone of a woman who has seen, and survived, more of life. Wonderfully lucid and engaging, toned with deep emotionality and a wry observation of life, the poems of Julia Alvarez stand next to her fiction to both delight us and give us lessons in living and loving.

HomecomingHomecoming

Housekeeping
How I Learned to Sweep
Dusting
Household Riddle
Making Our Beds
The Master Bed
Washing the Windows
Storm Windows
Hairwashing
Hanging the Wash
Folding My Clothes
Ironing Their Clothes
Rolling Dough
What Could It Be?
Posture Lesson
New Clothes
Naming the Fabrics
Orchids
Charges
Mother Love
Woman's Work

Heroines
Heroines
Woman Friend
Wallpaper
Against Cinderella
Old Heroines

33

Redwing Sonnets

Last Night at Tía's

Afterword: Coming Home to Homecoming