Puerto Rico is a beautiful island paradise that visitors often take for granted. It is located right on the ocean so that its shores are home to some of the most amazing beaches but that is only what people who don’t live there see. This collection is from the heart of a native. Someone who knows Puerto Rico very well and calls it home. A place where the skin of its native sons and daughters as been kissed by the sun and the view of life from their perspective is calm and enchanting. Always recognizing the importance of family, the balance of having everything you need and not realizing that you don’t have as much as others because it doesn’t matter and the most important part of home- Mama’s cooking. The poem For the Love of Puerto Rico shares with us everything there is to love about the island from the views to the food and the all-around feeling of home. From sun rise to sunset the life of turning in constant circles, what it means to live life there. Which is balanced with I Hate Maria, a poem that tells of the destruction that hurricane Maria left on the island at the point of impact and still many years after.