Song of the Simple Truth
by Julia de Burgos
Puerto Rico's greatest poet, collected at last.
For you if
you want to understand what it means to love your island from exile and know you can never fully go back
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Julia de Burgos was born in Puerto Rico in 1914, moved to New York, and died broke and unidentified on a Harlem street in 1953 at thirty-nine. Her poems are dispatches from inside the experience of being a Puerto Rican woman who refused every limitation — colonial, patriarchal, economic — and paid for that refusal with everything. This collected edition brings together the full arc of her work. The most important Puerto Rican literary voice in English translation and one of the great unread poets of the 20th century.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Puerto Rico • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Puerto Rican author
- Themes
- colonialismexile
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
The Broken Spears
Miguel León-Portilla
The conquest of Mexico, told by the conquered.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Malinche
Laura Esquivel
History's most complicated woman gets her own voice.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Death and the King's Horseman
Wole Soyinka
A ritual suicide interrupted by colonialism.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Ambiguous Adventure
Cheikh Hamidou Kane
Sent to learn the enemy's weapons. He loses himself.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
