The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
The Poet X is a young adult book by Elizabeth Acevedo. I was first alerted to this book by our wonderful local author Laurie Halse Anderson who, before the book was even published, told us: keep an eye out for this book, it’s a big one and important!
The book was published in 2018 and has won many awards, including a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and, from the American Library Association (ALA), the 2019 Youth Media Awards/Pura Belpré Award, for a Latina writer who best portrays the Latino experience for children, and the Michael Printz Award for best young adult literature. It came out in paperback in April of this year.
By way of a quick plot description: A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother’s religion and her own relationship to the world. It is the debut novel of renowned slam poet Elizabeth Acevedo. (Read more on the author’s website HERE.)
It took me a long time to get to the book, but I just finished it, and wow!
Actually, I didn’t read the book. I listened to it. I got the audio version of the book from Libro.fm, an audiobook provider that serves independent bookstores (you know that Audible is owned by Amazon, right?).
The audiobook also won an award from the ALA. It is read by the author, and I am so glad I got to hear the poetry of the book in her vibrant voice – it added so much to the experience for me, especially the parts in Spanish. It didn’t matter a bit that I didn’t understand those parts – they sound so beautiful in her voice!
The whole book is a story about poetry told in poetic form, and it’s one of those examples of young adult books that are equally enjoyable to adults. To be given a look inside this Dominican-American family, and to experience what the main character Xiomara is feeling as she struggles with her mother, who wants her to be more involved with and more loyal to the Catholic Church, and meanwhile Xiomara is burning up inside with her passion for poetry (and an emerging love interest as well).
I’m in a writers group with eleven people, and some of the members are poets. For years we’ve been reading their work and those of us who feel less comfortable with poetry have been learning to read it and to understand it, and to appreciate its nuance and its flexibility as a form. Reading this book taught me why and how poetry is so powerful, and how some people just need poetry in order to express themselves.
This book is a gift. Please read it! (Want to buy a copy? Visit my “Lynn Reads a Book” online shop on bookshop.org)
