SOURCE: "Lines of Pain," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. VII, No. 6, March, 1990, pp. 12-13.

In the following favorable review of Women of the River, Vollmer lauds Alegría 's ability to appeal to a wide audience while preserving an "uncanny intimacy " with readers.

For years I've looked for the inheritor of the traditions of Neruda and Mistral, for a poet who speaks to both South and North American audiences from her heritage and creates something new—what Alicia Ostriker has called feminist literature's "flying wedge of dissent," a wedge at the forefront of contemporary poetry. I have found that voice in the poems of Claribel Alegría, whose work is now firmly established in the US with the publication of her second book in the Pitt Poetry Series. Carolyn Forché translated Alegría's earlier Flowers from the Volcáno (1982), and the new book, Woman of the River...