The Poet X

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.