SOURCE: A review of The Other Side/El Otro Lado, in Library Journal, Vol. 120, No. 7, April 15, 1995, p. 80.

In the following review, Ratner praises The Other Side/El Otro Lado.

Alvarez (author of … How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) writes poems as impressive as her fiction. In the opening sequence [of The Other Side/El Otro Lado] writing of a loving maid and governess, she portrays with graceful simplicity the world of haves and have nots suggested in the duality we find in the title. Whereas poets from similar backgrounds—uprooted, mocked—write bitterly of the past and ambivalently of the future, Alvarez optimistically sets about "Making Up the Past." As the poems move from childhood memories to adult realities, they become less succinct, less headed toward closure. Lines stretch out. Anger enters. The setting of the long title sequence is ironic: at an artist's colony not far...