“I thought it would be cathartic / to write something beautiful for yourself”.
Elizabeth Acevedo claims to have written The Poet X in response to what her 8th grade students were asking to see in literature: a story that reflected their lives. This compendium of poems that work together as a novel is the path to finding your own voice. Poems are powerful, they state that we are in the present moment, healing wounds and building the future.
“There is freedom in choosing to sit and be still / when everything is always telling you to move, move fast”.
Even though she's always been interested in poetry, her performance in the arena of slam poetry developed from her love of rap and hip-hop, which encompassed a rebellious way of expression. Perhaps there is nothing more personal than a piece of poetry that tells a story and wants to be heard…somewhere.
In The Poet X, Acevedo conveys the feeling of what it's like to have your first crush, to explore ideas that lead you to finding your identity, even if that means distancing yourself from the views parents or society may hold.
Aside from the fact that this book has received numerous prizes and recognitions and put Acevedo on the literary map, I do appreciate the way the voices in her poems try to recreate those one of a kind moments that shape us in a stage of life as complex as adolescence.
“We’re wild women, flinging verses at each other / like grenades in a battlefield, a cacophony of violent poems -”
The novel is divided into three parts: “Part I: In the Beginning Was the Word”, “Part II: And the Word Was Made Flesh” and “Part III: The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness” where we see the main character, Xiomara, transition from a girl who would never dared share her thoughts, to a grown woman who knows who she is and makes the word alive. Made flesh and made cry, the poet X (for Xiomara) manages to break free from the mandates of her mother and religion.
“And that’s how Xiomara, / bare-knuckled, fought the world / into calling her correctly by her name, / into not expecting her to be a saint, / into respecting her as a whole grown-ass woman”.
We find ourselves in a moment in history where society is trying to understand what it's like to be a woman and receive the advances of men while managing to build an identity. Acevedo portrays perfectly that contradiction of liking someone for the first time and fearing how our bodies will respond.
There's something about the experience of owning your words and your body in front of an crowd. Making a connection with strangers and being heard by them when maybe there are other spaces of your life where you're not being heard.
I loved the book because it can resonate with a wide and diverse audience. How it develops the topic of immigrant parents trying to pass on their language and convictions to their children and how difficult that is to maintain as the new generations are exposed to new societal norms. The hardness and softness of the characters shouldn't be defined by gender according to the author because they have both, even if the outside world tries to shape them into the cookie-cutter molds they do not belong in.
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