In Person

BookPeople, April 16

For Julia Alvarez fans, the title of her new book of poetry, The Woman I Kept to Myself (Algonquin, $18.95), might seem puzzling. After novels like How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo!, the essays of Something to Declare, three earlier books of poetry, and three young-adult books, fans could well be asking: What did the author keep to herself?

Well, there are a few things, Alvarez said to the 30-plus audience members at her BookPeople reading last Friday. Though her work is not overtly autobiographical, the label clings to her, perhaps because she acknowledges the influences from life growing up in the Dominican Republic, while embracing the life of letters she discovered as an immigrant in the States.

"Even I, the childless one, intend to write New Yorker fiction in the Cheever style/but all my stories tell where I came from," she ends "Family Tree," the first poem in her collection. Thoughts about living biculturally, negotiating two languages, and falling in love with language before ethnic fiction staked its claim in bookstores are sprinkled naturally throughout her poems and are the focus of others ("El Fotografo," "Spic," and "All American Girl," to name three). None of the poems are manifestos. Each of the 75 poems are well-considered insights written to commemorate reaching middle age: the daydreams that lingered when doctor's appointments or missed flights muscled ahead for attention.

"Poems are little machines where we talk about things that can't be kept in words," Alvarez explained to her audience. It's this flirtatiousness with words and ideas that delights her readers and kept nearly everyone lingering for the booksigning.

If there's anything to regret about the poems, it's that the forms – three stanzas written in iambic pentameter – all have the same rhythmic pattern. While the ordered neatness has a certain appeal on the page, after hearing several read aloud, the desire to rough the edges crept into this listener's mind. But not the rest of the audience, it seemed. They each got a moment with Alvarez, sharing how they found her work or their desire to be a better writer. Alvarez graciously listened with rapt attention, signed their books with a small flourish and an occasional mi cariño before sending the ardent readers off to fall in love with her work all over again.