The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
The train stops and starts
like an old woman with a bad cough.
But I feel more than jumbled
when I walk on, so a halting train
doesn’t faze me at all.
When I get off on 168th
it’s started snowing softly.
I turn my face into the wetness.
I pretend this is like a movie
where the sky offers healing.
But it only makes me colder.
This I a young adult novel-in-verse from a performance poet who has been a National Slam Champion. It tells the story of Xiomara, who slowly develops the nickname X and struggles with her overly-religious family, her gay brother, and her own emerging sexuality through writing poems. The novel is designed to look like poetry, and there are some fine moments of poetry in it. However, the structure is more episodic than poetic – very short “chapters” that tell of particular incidents or X’s feelings about those incidents and that build the overall narrative.
Questioning whether the verse in this novel-in-verse is legitimately poetry is petty, however, and is my only real criticism. The characters are very well-drawn and their conflicts feel real without spilling into urban clichés. While there are drugs and violence and teenage sex in this world, this is not an urban jungle, but a place where working class people struggle with both their dreams and their crowded, filthy environment. The arc of the story offers little that is new or surprising – you know her brother will be gay as soon as you meet him, you know her and her mother will have a crisis and that it will be resolved through mutual growth, you know that slam poetry will figure in that growth for both X and her mother. But I found this to be a page-turner. X becomes a vibrant person whose struggles become attractive and I found myself rooting for her throughout.
There are no real villains here – I frankly found myself rooting for everyone. Her mother’s religion is a bit close-minded and defensive, but you see a more humane and understanding approach to religion in her friend Caridad and know Mom can move in that direction. X’s sometimes boyfriend fails her, and he deserves to be dumped when she dumps him, but it is clearly a failure of the moment and not a character flaw and you root for him to make it up to her. The character of her brother Xavier is a minor disappointment – one of the marks that he is gay is that he is -unlike X- a good student who gets himself into a specialized high school and in that progressive, white environment is able to come to terms with his sexuality. However, Acevedo does make clear that life for gay teens is one of pretty relentless fear and loneliness, and that seems to ring true for a lot of kids. The saintly English teacher is too saintly – her lessons inspire except when she is wise enough to abandon them for something even more inspiring. I have seen the type in many movies and TV shows, though never met one in an actual school.
But these are the kinds of quibbles that exist in many an enjoyable novel and this was certainly enjoyable. I am, perhaps, not Ms. Acevedo’s target audience, but she hit me just the same.
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