poet x essays

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Summary and Study Guide

Elizabeth Acevedo’s award-winning 2018 young adult novel, The Poet X , brings to life the inner world of protagonist Xiomara Batista . Xiomara is 15 years old, and from her bedroom in Harlem, she writes poetry in order to put on the page all the feelings and ideas she cannot seem to be able to say out loud. Xiomara resigns herself to writing in her notebook and sharing her thoughts with only a few trusted individuals until her English teacher, Ms. Galiano , invites Xiomara to speak her words in a spoken word poetry club, and, later, at a citywide poetry slam competition.

Though this novel-in-verse takes place over only a few months during Xiomara’s sophomore year in high school, Xiomara goes through many significant experiences, all of which are documented in her poetry. Xiomara begins to doubt the religious teachings of her childhood as she matures into a curious and bright young woman. She struggles with her developing body and its effect on other people, experiencing at the same time what it feels like to fall in love. As Xiomara experiments with independence, she observes that her need to separate from her parents is particularly challenging for her mother. Mami lives and breathes by her Catholic faith, and she has high expectations for Xiomara, expectations that are vastly different from the ones that Xiomara has for herself.

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Against the urban backdrop of present-day Harlem, Xiomara, her twin brother, Xavier, and their friend, Caridad , grow up among drug-dealers and teenagers having babies well before they are ready to be parents. Their church is both a sanctuary and a jail for Xiomara, and she questions the teachings of the church with her characteristic incisive thoughtfulness. At school and on the street, Xiomara is both a quiet presence and a highly conspicuous one; her womanly figure means she is noticed, but Xiomara wants to be known for her creative abilities—for her dreams and her intellect, not for her curves. Xiomara’s relationship with her older parents is difficult, as they don’t seem to understand her, nor do they trust her judgment. Her mother’s devotion to the Catholic church means that Xiomara has to live up to Mami’s religious ideals, and just as Mami is setting impossible limits on Xiomara’s social freedoms, Xiomara falls deeply in love. She feels she must keep her romance with her biology lab partner, Aman , a secret, until everything becomes evident during the novel’s intensely dramatic and emotional moment of climax.

Written in a musical and compelling combination of slang, colloquialisms, and formal poetic language, The Poet X is an unusual and sensitive book that honors the rhythms of hip-hop while taking the reader along on the rollercoaster ride that is adolescence. Through Xiomara’s eyes, being a teenager has never been more challenging, but thanks to her insistence that she be true to herself, readers of all ages will learn that there is potential for beauty in every conflict. Love can take any number of forms, Xiomara learns, and the readers of her deeply-personal poetry are reminded of this inevitable fact of life with every stanza.

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Elizabeth Acevedo

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

by Elizabeth Acevedo

The poet x literary elements.

Young adult poetry/fiction

Setting and Context

21st-century New York City (Harlem)

Narrator and Point of View

The book is told from the first-person point of view of Xiomara.

Tone and Mood

Tone: confident, euphoric, funny, sympathetic, introspective, anxious, confused, fatalistic, furious

Mood: restless, discontented, revelatory, liberatory, thoughtful, vibrant

Protagonist and Antagonist

The protagonist is Xiomara, a Dominican teenage girl from Harlem who is an aspiring slam poet and who struggles with religion, her relationship with her mother, and the kind of person she wants to be. The antagonist is herself and her own self-consciousness, but also her mother, a devoutly Catholic woman with strict ideas about what her children should be.

Major Conflict

The major conflict is that Xiomara isn't sure who she wants to be - she struggles between feeling socially isolated and wanting to pursue poetry, but also knowing that her mother would oppose that. She struggles with her religious views and whether she wants to be confirmed in the church. All of this comes up against not only her mother's view of what she should be, but also with her own internalized idea of what she should be; thus, the book follows her figuring out who she will be.

The climax of the book is when Xiomara's mother finds her journal and lights it on fire.

Foreshadowing

1. When Xiomara cannot find her notebook, Acevedo is foreshadowing the discovery that Mami has found it. 2. Xiomara catches Twin looking at one of the male basketball players, foreshadowing our discovery that he is gay

Understatement

1. "Just because your father's present, doesn't mean he isn't absent.” Xiomara says this to explain how absent her father truly is. This line is an understatement because her father is more than just not necessarily "not absent": he takes no role in raising his children, stays silent in conflicts, and hides away when things get too difficult.

1. The strong mental connection between Xiomara and Xavier is an allusion to the plethora of twin lore throughout mythology, where twins are seen as magical because of the connection between them. 2. There are numerous allusions to the Bible and Catholicism: priests, mass, communion, confirmation, seven deadly sins, Psalms and Proverbs, Eve, Jesus, etc. 3. There are numerous allusions to contemporary rappers: Nicki Minaj, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Eve

Acevedo uses light imagery - lanterns, the sun, light, etc. - to show how poetry and friends make Xiomara's life better and bring happiness to it. Her life is dark until she finds things that bring light and happiness into it.

1. Xiomara's mother is a paradox. She is a devout Catholic, and her strong religious beliefs should mean that she is a kind and peaceful person (Christianity is a religion of tolerance) but instead she is judgmental and strict, acting in a way that is paradoxical to her religious beliefs. 2. "Just because your father's present / doesn't mean he isn't absent" (65) 3. "...too many things to say and nothing to say at all" (147)

Parallelism

1. Xiomara and Aman meet in biology class as lab partners, where they learn about Darwin in class together. When they get together later in the book, Xiomara compares her heart to one of Darwin's finches taking off, paralleling how the two of them met.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

1. Xiomara frequently talks about how she disagrees with what the church does and what they believe. Obviously the physical church building doesn't believe anything, so this is her using the word "church" as a metonymy for the individual people who work in it.

Personification

1. "Harlem is opening its eyes to September" (3) 2. " . . . I let my knuckles speak for me" (5) 3. " . . . she took all of the stereotypes / and put them in a chokehold / until they breathed out the truth" (126) 4. "And any words I have / suicide-jump off my tongue" (132)

The Poet X Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Poet X is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Which of the following quotes most clearly shows the author's attitude about church?

Are you providing the quotes?

What are 6 important events in order?

Are you asking for bullet points for one particular poem, or for bullet points using the collection?

poet x ''poem Ms.Galiano''

Sorry, what is acevedo?

Study Guide for The Poet X

The Poet X study guide contains a biography of Acevado, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Poet X
• The Poet X Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Poet X

The Poet X essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Poet X by Acevado.

• Discovering Self Worth through Spoken Word in "The Poet X"
• Elizabeth Acevedo’s Ode to Adolescent Power: Culture, Conflict, and Reassurance in The Poet X

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The Poet X is a stunning amplification of the Latina experience: EW review

Xiomara Batista is often urged to bite her tongue. The “miracle” of her and her twin brother Xavier’s births to her aging Dominican parents makes Xio feel like a spectacle in her Harlem community, a constant point of conversation and judgment. This hypervisibility only increased when her body blossomed into womanly curves, forcing her to fend off unwanted advances by local boys with her fists. In contrast, the confines of her devoutly religious mother’s rules have stripped the 16-year-old of her ability to voice her own beliefs (and doubts), making her feel unheard and unseen. It’s not until she joins a slam poetry club at school that she finds a home for her words and the courage to express them freely. Through the pressure of her mother’s expectations, the comparison to “Twin’s” perfection, and her forbidden exploration of first love, Xiomara spins her perspectives into stanzas, embracing The Poet X .

Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel, written in verse, continuously draws in its reader with sensory-igniting imagery. This work is broken into three major sections, which are titled with Bible scriptures, juxtaposing Xiomara’s rejection of religion. In each, our heroine’s journey mimics the context of verse that proceeds it. The reader walks with Xio from submission to rebellion to liberation, and as her perspective changes, so does the stanza structure to encourage appropriate pacing in the absence of performance; the pacing of words conveys the protagonist’s mood, forcing the reader to feel as she feels and board her train of thought.

Acevedo discovered her desire to author a novel in 2012 while working as an eighth grade English teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Latinx students made up 77 percent of her school’s population, and she couldn’t understand why her students weren’t more interested in reading until a young girl made a striking observation.

“These books aren’t about us,” Acevedo recalled during the launch party for The Poet X , held at the Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. “They don’t look like us. They’re not from our neighborhoods. They don’t speak like us. They don’t walk through the world like us. These ain’t our books.”

In response, Acevedo showered her pupils with works by Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and other writers whose stories they could see themselves in. Still, they craved more. She’d pull from her nearly 14 years as a performance poet to recite spoken word, but she realized she wanted to gift them with something tangible; something that could live beyond the confines of their classroom. After achieving a MFA in creative writing, and several episodes of trial and error, The Poet X was born.

While struggles with faith, family, and self-acceptance are not unique teenage experiences, it is their presentation through the lens of Xiomara’s Afro-Latina heritage that makes her story a startling standout. The balance of humor and emotion with which her thoughts are expressed is charming and engaging. Acevedo has elevated the adolescent narrative; despite the age of her protagonist, she has successfully addressed themes of sexism, sexuality, and Christianity while providing a point of reference for Latinx readers searching for themselves in literature and life. A

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The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Banned book writing prompts.

Matthew Burgess

In Banned Book Writing Prompts, a new series in  Teachers & Writers Magazine , we aim to push back against the growing movement to censor what students can read and to show what happens when we enthusiastically embrace banned works rather than fear them. You can read  an introduction to this series by Susan Karwoska here , and you can find more  Banned Book Writing Prompts here . Also in the magazine: “ The Braver We Become: A Conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo .”

I had been teaching “Literature for Young People” at Brooklyn College for several years, and I needed to shake up the syllabus. I asked one of my graduate students to recommend a contemporary YA novel, and he immediately suggested The Poet X . “I think you’ll really love it,” he said, and with this encouragement, I dove in.

It didn’t take long for me to become immersed in Elizabeth Acevedo’s gorgeous, pitch-perfect novel-in-verse. Her protagonist, Xiomara Batista, is a high school sophomore in Harlem navigating conflicting feelings about religion, love, family, and self-expression. The typical plot points of a coming-of-age story appear, and in Acevedo’s masterful hands, every twist and turn feels genuine. I devoured it in two days and immediately swapped it into my syllabus for the following semester at Brooklyn College. 

Could you imagine if, at 13, you read a book about a young Hispanic girl navigating through almost exactly the same issues as you did? All that anger, frustration, confusion, and insecurity would have been maybe a bit easier to work through.

I was especially moved by the vivid descriptions of the poetry classroom as a sanctuary and creative laboratory. Acevedo describes this space—a space I cherish—with great authenticity. Over the years I’ve seen what poetry can do, the way it can alchemize young people and help bring out their voices. I was excited to see this represented in The Poet X .

Acevedo’s dedication, which precedes the opening poem, is “To Katherine Bolaños and my former students at Buck Lodge Middle School 2010–2012, and all the little sisters yearning to see themselves: this is for you.” With this, Acevedo makes one of her intentions explicit: to offer a “mirror” to young women of color who have been underrepresented in literature for young people for so long. I’ve been teaching The Poet X consistently for several years now, and my students’ responses provide the most moving and eloquent testimony about the importance of this reflection. I’ve asked and received permission from two students to share excerpts from their writing.

In her reading response titled “Sisters with Voices,” Jessica Sheppard writes:

Ahhh, another home run for the brown girls who preferred sneakers over sandals and open mouths with closed fists. Xiomara feels like a home girl I knew growing up, one who my mom wouldn’t have wanted me hanging out with because, “we cause trouble when we’re together.” But I sneak around with her anyway, because I need her. I need to know that there are other girls out there who take a lot of hits and talk a lot of shit. I need to feel her fear, so that I may give myself permission to acknowledge my own. I need to see her tears, because I need proof that it’s okay for strong girls to cry. More importantly, I need to know that if you do the tears won’t melt the tough shell that took so long to build in the first place. Xiomara is my friend, my sister. We talk on the phone and muse about all of things we see and want and hope to have for ourselves. We push past one another’s protective exteriors to open ourselves up to what we know will be a tender, sometimes painful exchange of stories, experiences, laughs, and questions about who we are, where we have been, and the fact that neither of us is really sure where we’ll go. [. . .] Xiomara’s is a story that speaks to so many people’s experiences, but I’d like to think that this coming-of-age tale is especially triumphant to women of color who are bold and bright enough to speak, even before they’re spoken to. 

Another student, Briana Pascascio, a graduate student working on her degree in education, created a final project about The Poet X in the form of an extended multimedia letter to her younger self. In an introductory passage, she writes:

But could you imagine if, at 13, you read a book about a young Hispanic girl navigating through almost exactly the same issues as you did? All that anger, frustration, confusion, and insecurity would have been maybe a bit easier to work through. Maybe, you would have gained your confidence years earlier or a better way to express yourself beyond just listening to music and coded journaling. Well, I’d like to share something with you. You discover (and are also assigned) a verse named The Poet X written by Elizabeth Acevedo and, in two days, you complete the book and all your 28-year-old brain could think was, “Wow! This was me.” And your mind reeled with how different you might have felt if this novel was written 10 years earlier and mom borrowed the book from the library for you to read. Through reading this book, you discover the 13-year-old you who, in a way, still needed this book. Then you realize that you will make sure you have all kinds of literature in your future English classroom that causes all the different walks of life in your class to feel seen. But, to circle back to you, who realized how much you still needed this novel, I will share with you the moments in the novel you needed the most.

These beautiful testimonies demonstrate the power of Acevedo’s story to inspire, to encourage, to comfort, and to summon inner reserves of strength and creativity. You also can see how Acevedo’s writing provides a platform for student writing. Like all great art, it quickens our own creative impulse to act and create in response.

The idea of banning a book as beautiful as this one, as necessary as this one, feels outrageous to me. As in: rage-inducing, appalling. Since I first included The Poet X on my syllabus, students have received this book as a balm, a blessing, and a lifeline. Again and again they say, this is a book that would have made the younger me feel less alone, more empowered. May those of us in the position of sharing books like these offer them to the readers who need them most.

Writing Prompt 1

The gaps between drafts: encouraging creativity & authenticity.

Given that Elizabeth Acevedo was once a middle-school teacher, and to this day leads writing workshops with young people, I think the writing prompts included in The Poet X are all worth sharing. In five instances throughout the book, we encounter a writing prompt given by Xiamora’s English teacher, Ms. Galiano. First we read the “rough draft” of Xiamora’s response to the assignment, and then we see her final draft, what she “actually turns in.” Acevedo offers this glimpse into the ways in which students alter, erase, or flatten their voices into a form that feels more acceptable, more “teacher friendly.” By offering the unfiltered “rough draft” beside the more formal and decidedly less lively “final draft,” we see this code-shifting process play out.

Take a look at one or more of Xiomara’s rough drafts and compare them with the accompanying final draft: Have you noticed a similar dynamic playing out in your own writing? How might your writing look, and feel, and sound, if you were given the permission to be more yourself or more creatively free? What is the line between code-shifting and self-censorship?

Following Xiomara’s example, respond to one of the writing prompts below, from The Poet X, with a “rough” version free of any constraints whatsoever, and a “final” version that conforms to your perceived preferences of a teacher or professor. Then compare the differences between the two as a means of exploring how code-shifting can limit creativity.

Assignment 1: Write about the most impactful day of your life. Assignment 2: Last Paragraphs of My Biography Assignment 3: Describe someone you consider misunderstood by society. Assignment 4: When was the last time you felt free? Assignment 5: Explain Your Favorite Quote

Writing Prompt 2

Making “place” pop on the page.

Read the very first poem in the book, “Stoop Sitting,” and notice how Acevedo evokes the setting through vivid description, or what I call with my younger students, “delicious details.” What lines create images in your mind?

Now think of a place you’ve lived or a place you know well, whether it’s your own block or stoop, or some outdoor spot of your choice. A meditation can be helpful here: try closing your eyes and envisioning what you see, hear, smell, and feel, followed by a free-write to gather these impressions, in note form, on the page. Set a timer for 7–15 minutes and write a draft of a poem using “Stoop-Sitting” as a model. If you prefer more structure, you can begin each stanza with some or all of Acevedo’s verbs:

I scope out . . . Peep . . . Listen to . . . Laugh at . . . Shake my head as . . .

Writing Prompt 3

“let’s talk about line breaks”.

After teaching The Poet X at Brooklyn College for the first time, I reached out to Elizabeth Acevedo for an interview with Teachers & Writers Magazine . Here is a short excerpt from one exchange:

Matthew: When reading  The Poet X , I was struck by your line breaks and the way you negotiate the page. Do you have any strategies for teaching that level of craft with students?  Elizabeth : This is my favorite question. I’m like, “Let’s talk about line breaks!”

What follows this exchange is a helpful consideration about the various elements that influence a poet’s placement of line and stanza on the page, including pacing, breath, and emphasis. When I was first writing free verse poems, I wondered about these elements of craft and hungered for opportunities to explore them, and to this day, I enjoy examining the effects of spacing and enjambment with my students.

To start, take some time to explore a few of the poems in The Poet X where the line breaks create noticeable effects. For example, you might begin with a quieter example in “Warmth,” a poem about Xiomara holding hands with her crush, Aman. Read the poem aloud to demonstrate the subtle effects of the spacing in these lines:

We are silent the whole walk. Without words we are in agreement that we’ll walk as far as we can this way: my hand     held     in his     held in his coat pocket. Each of us keeping the other warm against the quiet chill.

When I recently discussed this poem with my class at Brooklyn College, one student noted the way the alliterative “w” brings emphasis to the intimacy of these two young individuals who are beginning to become a “we.” Then I asked: what do we make of the additional spaces in the line beginning “my hand”? Someone pointed out that it slows the pace and makes the reader focus in on the held hands. Another observed that these spaces evoke the heartbeat, and in this way, we feel the “racing heart” of the poem’s speaker in this moment of intimacy and touch.

A more dramatic example arrives later in the two consecutive poems “Ants” and “I Am No Ant,” which depict of an intense moment of confrontation between Xiomara and her mother. In the first, the poem steps down the page with one word per line:

In this example, the shape of the lines mimics the downward motion as Xiomara’s mother forces her daughter to kneel and pray for forgiveness. In response, Xiomara tries “to make an ant of [her]self.” When I asked my students to reflect on the ways in which the form of this poem is connected to the content , they identified the connection between the descending lines and the pulling, as well as the way the isolation of each word on its own line gives the visual impression of ants.

For this writing prompt, I invite you to make your own exploration of the relationship between form and content. Here are two possibilities:

1. Write a poem about an early encounter with a crush or a first love, using present tense and vivid imagery. Following Acevedo’s example, look for places in the poem where the line breaks and/or spacing can heighten reader’s identification with the poem’s speaker.

2. Write a poem about a conflict with a parent, sibling, or friend. Experiment with the placement of the words on the page so that the shape of the poem captures and transmits some of the intensity of the conflict.

Further Reading: “ The Braver We Become: A Conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo ” by Matthew Burgess.

Matthew Burgess is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College. He is the author of eight children's books, most recently The Red Tin Box (Chronicle) and Sylvester’s Letter (ELB). Matthew has edited an anthology of visual art and writing titled  Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space (Secretary Press), as well as a collection of essays titled  Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry (T&W). More books are forthcoming, including: As Edward Imagined: A Story of Edward Gorey (Knopf, 2024), Words With Wings & Magic Things (Tundra, 2025), and  Fireworks (Harper Collins, 2024). A poet-in-residence in New York City public schools since 2001, Matthew serves as a contributing editor of Teachers & Writers Magazine .

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