"With Everything I Kept , Ruth Behar inserts herself into the expanding canon of Cuban women's writing, beyond any circumstantial divisions or geographic or emotional borders. Indebted to the most important women poets of Latin America and especially to Dulce María Loynaz, Ruth Behar takes poetry to the extremely subtle zones that form individuality. Over the course of this book she creates a unique lyrical discourse, expressing it at times in words and at times into silences, in which texts link up with other texts to form the history of a woman on a voyage across the waters. Here is the ocean, separating and mediating. And here is all the water, able to give new life to any harvest, clean away any grime, and even flood and bring down every dam. On a first reading, these poems seem aimed at a common story of love, but once the subtle rains and the storms of summer appear, a different story becomes perceptible, the story of a life marked by voyages toward the self, in which the other--the others--appear as the only possible extensions of the author's poetry and of her life itself.".