Cover of The Woman I Kept to Myself

The Woman I Kept to Myself

The works of this award-winning poet and novelist are rich with the language and influences of two cultures: those of the Dominican Republic of her childhood and the America of her youth and adulthood. They have shaped her writing just as they have shaped her life. In these seventy-five autobiographical poems, Alvarez's clear voice sings out in every line. Here, in the middle of her life, she looks back as a way of understanding and celebrating the woman she has become.

Themes
womenfeminism
Setting
2000slatin america
Subject
biography
Audience
adult
Length
short · 176 pages
Form
poetry

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Woman I Kept to Myself? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Woman I Kept to Myself. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Evidence: Poems Shares poetry, literature, nonfiction
  2. Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night Shares poetry, writers of color
  3. Loose Woman Shares poetry, feminism, latino literature
  4. My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems Shares poetry, latin american, women

“People who read The Woman I Kept to Myself tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry
  2. Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002
  3. Chicana Falsa
  4. Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond

“If you want more of the same (biography about women), start with these.”

  1. I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems
  2. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972
  3. Winter Garden
  4. One Secret Thing

“If it was the poetry that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. New American Best Friend
  2. For Teenage Girls With Wild Ambitions and Trembling Hearts
  3. The School Among the Ruins
  4. Your Native Land, Your Life

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Norton Book of American Autobiography
  2. Scenes from a Writer's Life
  3. The Random House Treasury of Best-Loved Poems
  4. Lord Weary's Castle: The Mills of the Kavanaughs