Author Asks
1. What is the significance of the book's title? From what does the poet
feel "exiled," in addition to loss of homeland, and how has that condition
been transformed into a "garden"?2. In "The First Woman," the poet tells of discovering another meaning for
ave. The epiphany seems emblematic of the "double-headedness" of the
bilingual/bicultural writer. Are there other ways in which the poet’s
intimacy with two languages and two worlds—Cuba and the U.S.—leads her to
revelatory connections between them that deepen your own understanding? 3. What do poems like "Why I Would Rather Be a Painter" and "Plein Air" seem to be saying about the particular challenges of writing as compared to
painting? 4. Clearly, the poet professes an affinity for the visual, but can you find
at least two poems in which the ear takes dominance over the eye? 5. Nature seems to "speak" in many of these poems. How does it do that, and
what does it appear to be telling us? 6. The last line of "Threshold" asks, "Who had I turned away at the door?"
Who (or what) is the presence that the poet seems to be encountering there?
What evidence do you have of that within the poem? In what other poems do
you get a sense of a similar presence? 7. What is the effect of the poet's use of both Spanish and English words in
"The Rosario Beach House"? If you know Spanish, comment on how the two
languages work together in the same poem; if you don't know Spanish,
describe your experience of encountering those foreign words and how it
affects your understanding of the poem. 8. This is a collection of both verse and prose poems. How do the prose
poems make for a different reading experience from the ones in more
traditional form? Do some subjects seem better suited to one form than the
other? Explain. 9. How do the poems of the last section ("The Garden") seem to be a response to the concerns of the poems in the earlier sections? 10. The poet seems to suggest that a variety of experiences offer
consolation for the alienation and rupture of exile, an exile that is more
than loss of homeland. What are some of these and in which poems did you
find them? "The Return" seems to offer one answer to the question. What is
it? Do other poems in the collection offer similar or different answers? 11. Every poet has a kind of "personal universe deck" of images or words
that habitually appear in poems. Can you identify the reappearing images or
words in this poet's work? 12. The poet seems to hold devotion and attention as values. Does she
suggest devotion is comprised of passion or practiced through passivity,
such as the alert passivity of the satellite dish in "The Invisible Body"?
In a dictionary, look up the root of the words passion and passive. 13. What significance do you find in the way the book begins and ends?
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