The Woman I Kept To Myself

Since her first celebrated novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, she has been expressing the passions and opin... (more)

Since her first celebrated novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, she has been expressing the passions and opinions of sisters and aunts, mothers and daughters, heroines and martyrs. In The Woman I Kept to Myself, seventy-five poems that weave together the narrative of a woman's inner life, it is Alvarez's own clear voice that sings out in every line. These are not poems of a woman discovering herself -- Alvarez might say that's what her twenties were for -- but of a woman returning to herself. Now, in the middle of her life, she looks back as a way of understanding and celebrating the woman she has become. Her voice becomes all our voices as she speaks of failed loves and marriages, late-in-life love, politics and prejudices that haunt us. The humanity and humor that permeate even her darkest thoughts are offered to the reader in these wise and intimate poems. (less)