Julia Alvarez

You know, everything hurts.

But she said...

You get one good thing where you sit on your front porch, you got hindsight, you got foresight, and you got insight.

That's 360 degrees.

You can go back and, you know, I think the poems now, the writer Angie Cruz asked me one of the poems in the collection waiting for my father to pick me up at the library.

Could you have written that poem like 20 years ago or 10 years ago?

No.

There's a kind of widening, deepening, and I think that creates kind of an elegiac tone.

Sure.

Because you see only something that you see with time, and that means to loss.

The things you're seeing are lost many times.

Well, there is a poem called Visitation, a narrative poem about going to a nursing home and the speaker encounters, well, it isn't her dead mother, but a person that she's convinced that it's a visitation.

So I thought of that title, but I think visitation, I'm sure, you know, that sense of that our dead are always with us, and that's very much a part of

my Dominican Caribbean culture, their constant presences.

And as the older you get, that membrane between the worlds gets thinner and thinner.

Most of the people that you love have gone over.

And so

A visitation is a way for not letting go of them.

You know, they come back if you're present to them.

So that and visitation from my Catholic childhood catechism was when Mary went to visit Elizabeth and they're both pregnant.