Julia Alvarez is a highly regarded writer and winner of many awards and fellowships, including the PEN Oakland Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Yaddo residency, with novels named as American Library Association Notable and National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. Published in such high-profile venues as The New York Times Magazine, Allure, and The New Yorker, Alvarez has written a range of books for adults and, more recently, for children. Of her eleven books, just two are full-length collections of poetry, printed eleven years apart, but her poetry remains largely unconsidered. Although most critics view her solely as a novelist, Julia Alvarez began her career with poetry--as an anthology editor of senior-citizen poetry, with Old Age Ain't for Sissies (1979), as a chapbook author, with The Housekeeping Book (1984), and then more prominently as the author of a longer collection, Homecoming: Poems (1984). A full seven...