Draft of Sonnet 33

Before writing her critically acclaimed novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), the Dominican American author Julia Alvarez published her first collection of poetry: a slender volume entitled Homecoming (1984) that takes a feminist approach to the themes of home and housekeeping. Among them is a cycle of 33 sonnets entitled simply “33”—Alvarez’s self-reflection on life as a 33-year-old Latina. She chose the traditional sonnet form because “for centuries women have been caged in these little fourteen-line boxes,” and she “wanted to get inside it and explode it.” Shown here is a draft of the final poem from “33,” a quote from which is memorialized on a bronze plaque along Library Way on East 41st Street.