Poet. A major Latin American author of the early 20th Century. Her verse expressed intense erotic yearning with bold, dense imagery.  Many view her as a proto-feminist because she saw sex as empowering for women, much to the  outrage of her predominately male critics. Agustini’s most provocative work is the poem cycle “The Rosary of Eros”. Other notable poems are “Mouth to Mouth”, “The Intruder”, “Fierce from Love”, “Explosion”, “Nocturne”, and “The Poet Weighs the Anchor”. Her tragic death added to her mystique. Agustini was born into a well-to-do family in Montevideo, Uraguay. As a teenager she sold poems to local magazines and wrote a weekly column under the pseudonym “Joujou” for the journal “The Dawn”, describing the accomplishments of women artists. Her first collection of poems, “The White Pages (Fragile)” (1907), was well-received, but “Songs of the Morning” (1910) and “Empty Chalices” (1913) created scandal with their frank explorations of female lust and sexuality. In 1913 Agustini married her longtime boyfriend, Enrique Job Reyes, a man with no connection to the arts; they separated within weeks, though she continued to see him as a lover. On July 6, 1914, one month after their divorce became final, Reyes shot Agustini to death and then committed suicide. She was 27.  At the time she was planning a fourth book entitled “The Stars of the Abyss”, which she believed would be her masterpiece; of this only “The Rosary of Eros” and a few other poems were completed. They were first published as part of her “Collected Poems” in 1924. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)