The Poet X

This was so beautiful! Elizabeth Acevedo brings life to her stories through her narration and I knew I wasn't going to go wrong with choosing to listen to this as an audiobook.

This tackled issues with living in an extremely religious and conservative household that I am quite familiar with, especially growing up in the Philippines.
Although I can't say I have extremely religious and conservative parents, I most definitely have family members that are, and cousins + close friends that share Xiomara's experiences.

What I especially loved about Xiomara was her questioning attitude when it came to the church's teachings, and hearing her thoughts about her culture and the societal structure and standards that so clearly favors men.

Acevedo is incredibly talented and I love the way she writes her characters, gives them their passions and dreams, a voice, and a story that so many can relate to.

This is my 300th read of the year and I really wanted to choose something very good and memorable. Despite not being a fan of the poetry format much, I'm so glad I decided to pick up this audiobook because this amazing little novel written in verse is worth all the accolades it has received and so much more.

Xiomara is a fierce rebellious teenager who is very relatable because we all have gone through that phase. Only when we start getting to know her better do we realize that her journey is much more heartbreaking. Since she has grown into her body, she has been harassed in public and in school, touched and groped and catcalled; on top of that, she also has to listen to her uber religious mother guilt her more into believing that her body is responsible for all the unwanted attention she is getting, which only makes Xio want to disappear. However, as she grows up, she starts questioning everything - why she is supposed to believe all the religious teachings that she is taught blindly, why is it wrong to like a boy and how is it her fault when she is the victim of daily harassment.

I was not sure how much of the plot could be expressed properly due to the format but the author does a wonderful job. Listening to it in her voice also makes it better because it felt like I was reading it the way she intended. After being silenced for so long, when Xio finally discovers the power of words and poetry, I really loved seeing her come into her own. All the walls she had built around her to protect herself crumpled slowly and she let us see her true feelings. The poems truly give us a glimpse into the mind of a teenage girl going through puberty - her jumbled feelings about kissing and touching, about consent, about feeling comfortable within herself and feeling strong enough to put herself out there and most importantly, wanting to do all these things even though she is not allowed to. Her character development is just brilliant and it was a joy seeing her grow. Her relationships with her twin and best friend are also beautifully written. However, I did struggle a lot with her mother's character - she is definitely a troubled woman who lets her own personal guilt (or maybe shame) determine how her daughter should be and some might call her behavior overprotectiveness, but for me it was emotional abuse and sometimes physical too. Though the author tries to give us a sense that the mother-daughter duo are to trying to repair their relationship, I thought the ending was too simplistic and I would have definitely liked to see more remorse from the mother.

If you are skeptical about this book because of its format, don't be. Just pick up the audiobook and let the author take you on this wonderful journey into the mind of an amazing strong young woman called the Poet X who will blow your mind with her raw honesty.

This is another much-hyped book - and oh man, did it stand up to the hype. Told entirely through poetry, this novel was extraordinarily powerful, and had me sobbing near the end. Xiomara is an amazing character, and her poetry shows us her emotions more than prose ever could.

I've always loved poetry for that reason; especially poetry that plays with formatting - spacing and line breaks and size of stanzas. It's so much more evocative than simple paragraphs of prose. (My favorite poet is probably e.e. cummings, who is rather infamous for unusual formatting.)

Acavedo does similar things, making Xiomara's poetry explode across the page when necessary, and ordering it into simpler stanzas in calmer moments. It's not rhyming, even poetry; this is written slam poetry. And I love it.

Xiomara is Dominican, living in Harlem, with a very strict, religious mother. Her twin brother is gay but not out to their parents; Xiomara is fine with this but knows their mother won't be. Her poems cover her need to protect her brother and herself, both from their parents and from the outside world. She writes about street harassment and questioning God and falling in love with a boy, which is also against her mother's rules. Her poems are at turns heartbreaking and joyous, but always beautiful.

This is an amazing book, and is the second book on my Best of the Year list. I am blown away.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.