Exile is Home

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

“Alves covers a lot of ground in a collection where the sacred and the profane, the downtrodden and the

queens, and redemption and spirituality pulse behind the specter sounds of the jazz greats like memory uncovered. A foot planted in two cultures shows us survival and living at its finest. Alves is a memory maker, a risk-taker and his poems are a guide along the way. Exile Is Home is a Brooklyn fever dream with a sturdy heartbeat and an associative memory of belonging.”

—MICHELLE REALE

“Each of the poems in Elvis Alves’s new collection is a crossroads between self and history, love and obligation, faith and grief. . . . Alves’s language is spare and precise. Not a word is wasted, which means that each word bears the weight both of meaning and of our experience of meaning, which duality is the remit of both…