The Poet X (2018)

Another great YA novel by Elizabeth Acevedo. I think I like this one even better than Clap When You Land. As someone who was a teenage writer, it gets me right in the feels.

Xiomara expresses herself in poetry. At home, she’s constantly battling with her strict Dominican mother. In church, she feels doubts about what she believes but feels judged when she expresses those doubts. In school and on the sidewalk, she’s harassed and objectified for her curves, which her mother then uses as proof that she’s a slut. Only in her writing can Xiomara articulate all that she feels and get closer to the person she wants to be.

Like Clap When You Land, this book is beautifully written in free verse poetry. I love the way Xiomara processes her life, feelings, and experiences through her poems, and it’s especially interesting to see how she approaches her English writing assignments, responding to the prompts with her true answers in poetic drafts before choosing “safer” angles written as more standard essays. I relate to how thoughtful, vulnerable, and poetic she is in writing while struggling to communicate in person.

And honestly, this story just breaks my heart. The questions Xiomara asks and the things she desires don’t make her a bad person, but she’s made to feel like one by her mother’s judgments and expectations. She feels like a criminal in her own home for texting a boy or wanting to skip confirmation class to go to slam poetry club, and every time her mother accuses or punishes or insults her, the gulf between them grows wider and wider. I root so hard for Xiomara to be able to get out from under that, to find a way to live as honestly as she does in her writing.

There are a lot of “issues” at play in the book, and they’re all given complex, nuanced treatment. Whether it’s religion, sexual harassment, family relationships, or emerging desires, Acevedo writes with a deft hand, weaving the ideas she wants to explore seamlessly into the narrative in a way that never feels like it’s getting on a soapbox or “checking off boxes.”

And I like that, while Clap When You Land just happens to be written in verse, The Poet X is specifically about a young poet and her writings. I love the sequences where Xiomara describes the process of writing or compares her own work with other slam poetry she’s heard. Any time she talks about reading/performing one of her poems aloud is magical, because I know all those feelings she talks about, overwhelming and contradictory as they can be. If this book had existed when I was a teenager, I’m not sure how I would’ve felt about it as a whole (I think I wouldn’t have been ready for some of the subject matter in it,) but I think the mere presence of Xiomara as a character would’ve made me feel very seen. Even though she and teenage me were different in many ways, these particular aspects of her as a writer hit home so closely in a way I didn’t often find in books I read back then.

Warnings

Language, sexual content (including sexual harassment,) violence, drinking/smoking references, and strong thematic elements.