Poetry Book Club: "Visitations" by Julia Alvarez

Doug Knowlton leads a discussion of "Visitations," the first book of poems by Julia Alvarez in over twenty years.
About this Event

This monthly book club, led by Doug Knowlton, is for those who like to read and discuss poetry. It celebrates the integral role of poets and poetry in life and literature. November's selection is Visitations - her long-awaited collection with scintillating poems drawn from all seasons of her life, from childhood to the years of silver.

We meet in person in the loft of our store in The Mark building at 117 South Pineapple Avenue. The cost is your purchase of the book ($27), which can be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

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 smells of sancocho and sofrito, the formative influence of her tías and her sisters, 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, visit the homes where she grew up and the homes where she grew into the formidable writer read in thousands of classrooms across America today. Her wisdom is as clear and beautiful as the light that shines through glass and yet grounded through the form and substance of self-knowing.
Told with a storyteller’s intimacy and the comfort of a warm hearth, this is a master writer’s reflection on family, aging, love, the body, having a voice, and the very act of composing 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 happens: we arrive / where we were promised, belong to / what we longed for in ourselves, each other.”

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 numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including her beloved first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and In the Time of the Butterflies, which was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its Big Read program. She was the subject of an American Masters documentary, Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined, on PBS and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. She lives in Vermont.