Visitations

In her prismatic fourth collection, novelist, memoirist, and poet Alvarez (The Woman I Kept to Myself) spins richly detailed micro-narratives of her childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s, her young adulthood in New York City, and beyond. Vivid scenes include reciting poems for her mother’s guests while wearing “a pink party dress with a flaring crinoline” and attending the American embassy school, where she felt excluded by the teacher: “He seldom called on us natives/ with our caramel skin, unruly hair/ wetted and tightly braided.” Later, in New York, she recalls immersing herself in books when her father would drop her off at the library while he looked for work: “This was the trade-off for coming to America:/ you became as small as the country you came from/ a speck on an ocean I could cover with my thumb.” Alvarez brings her trademark humor to vulnerable scenes, as in “At the Mental Health Clinic Waiting Room,” where the speaker, struggling with “the old bout of self-doubt,” observes the scene around her: “The schizophrenic skims/ her People, the paranoid broods/ over a breast brochure, god bless/ the anorexic feasting on her nails.” The result is vivid and arresting. (Apr.)