Julia de Burgos, a Puerto Rican poet who was born in the year of the first world war, is the poet of choice for this edition of the Latino Book Club. Other than Jose Vilson, I don’t really dig poetry these days.

Over 200 of her poems have been compiled for this poetry collection entitled Song of the Simple Truth Obra Completa poética the Complete Poems, translated from the Spanish by Jack Agüeros, himself a poet with introduction notes by Gareth Price.

De Bourgos actually died in 1953, but is she like the Hispanic Emily Dickinson or what? Or more potent?

In poems like “Momentos”, she drops it like this:

“Yo fatalista, mirando la vida llegándose y alejándos de mis semejantes/Yo, dentro de mí misma, siempre en espera de algo que no acierta mi mente.”

“Me, fatalist, watching life coming and going from my contemporaries/Me, inside myself, always waiting for something that my mind can’t define.”

In another poem she calls “Cuando me enamorabas”, she talks about the discrepancy in a man’s behavior when he’s courting a woman, and afterwards—when he actually has her fallen for him.

“Mi alma”, another poem, seems to have some autobiographical overtones:

“My soul? A broken harmoney/that hops over its dementia/on the cushion of time.”

Wait, I know I said her style is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, but scratch that, make that Sylvia Plath, for the majority of the poems, heck I’d say the bulk of the poems, are very pensive, sometimes depressing in their tone, but always fluid. Heck, she’s in her own category, that poetic mami Julia de Bourgos, and am I glad that she’s in this week’s edition of the Latino Book Club.