The novel became an international best-seller and won her a PEN Oakland Award and a notable book designation with the American Library Association and
The New York Times. Despite the passage of time, though, substantial critical attention to Alvarez's abiding poetic interests remains scant. Even while writing prose, Alvarez shows her love of poetry, often as an important part of a character's life, whether in Yoyo's discovery of Walt Whitman in
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, or in Minerva's love of poetry in
In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), or in the narrative of her latest novel,
In the Name of Salomé (2000), in which the main character Camila mourns the loss of her mother, Salomé Urena, a poet whom Alvarez describes as the Emily Dickinson of the Dominican Republic. Alvarez's largely autobiographically based poetry in the two versions of
Homecoming and in
The Other Side: El Otro Lado (1995) uses the pleasure of poetic form as a way of understanding, perhaps fixing for a moment, the identities of immigrant, daughter, author, divorcée, woman, sister, lover, friend, and character.
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