Her inspiration was the use of cleaning as a metaphorical statement (Alvarez Interview 6). "Dusting" tells the story of watching her mother dust pieces of furniture, erasing all of her carefully placed signatures and fingerprints, with an innocent wonder. However, the last line is angry and disturbing: "But I refused with every mark / to be like her, anonymous (Homecoming 9)." Throughout the housekeeping section, there are numerous hostile references to her mother, and "Hairwashing" proves more successful in its representation and reasoning for such emotion. "I was growing up / even as she scrubbed for dirt, / horns, anything that looked like sin." During Alvarez's very personal attempt to blossom, her mother was busy behind her with mop and broom, wiping away all the shameful changes. She is successful in her declaration: "She could not wring desire from my body / or take the curl out of my hair (Homecoming 19)." Alvarez speaks of her cleaning poetry, claiming, "I was using the material of my housebound girl life to claim my woman's legacy (Homecoming 119).".
Like much of her work, "Alvarez frequently blurs the lines between poetry and fiction and uses circular, rather than chronological narrative structures (Contemporary 1)." It is this creative set up that carries the reader through to "33," a long poem that takes up the vast majority of the collection. One critic describes it as a "diary-like assemblage of meditations, stories, and confessions (Muratori 2)." The conclusion contains her admittance of confusion and that the words that it has spawned form the truest picture of her. "Sometimes the words are so close I am / more who I am when I"m down on paper / than anywhere else / Who touches this poem touches a woman (Homecoming 102)." Alvarez painfully describes the feeling of a true artist - one that suffers painfully from the realization that the written word has the power to be more honest than what it attempts to describe.
