The Poet X
by Elizabeth Acevedo
Her mother controls her body. Poetry gives her somewhere to be loud.
For you if
you have been told to take up less space and have found that writing is the place where you don't have to
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Xiomara Batista is a fifteen-year-old Dominican American girl in Harlem with a body that gets noticed and a voice that gets silenced — at home by a devout Catholic mother, at school by the usual machinery of invisibility. She writes poems in a notebook. She discovers slam poetry. The novel is itself a poem — written entirely in verse — which means Acevedo's voice as a poet is the delivery system for Xiomara's voice as a character. National Book Award winner. The YA novel that most precisely captures the experience of being a girl whose body and voice are both being managed by everyone around her, and who finds in poetry the place where neither can be controlled.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Dominican Republic • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Dominican author
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