"The Poet X" Is the Next Book You Need to Read

“You need to read The Poet X.”

This is what I texted all my friends as soon as I read the last line of this book; I wanted to tell every person I spoke to that this book would not get out of my head.

Born and raised in New York city and the daughter of Dominican immigrants, Acevedo was a National Poetry Slam Champion and coached for the D.C. Youth Slam Team. The Poet X is her debut novel and quickly became a New York Times Bestseller. It also has won multiple awards including the 2019 Michael L. Printz Award and the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. With The Poet X being her debut novel, we are so impressed with her work and cannot wait to see what Acevedo comes out with next. 

The Poet X is a breathtaking novel in verse narrated by the protagonist, Xiomara Batista, who is a passionate and headstrong young Afro-Latina woman growing up in Harlem. Xiomara slowly falls in love with poetry, especially spoken word poetry. Xiomara pours her emotions and reflections of her day to day life into her poetry journal, commenting on topics ranging from pressures from her mother’s religion to gender to sexuality.

Acevedo told Publisher’s Weekly that she “pulls from her experience working with teens and her own high school journals”, which clearly is seen in her poetry, which truly channeling the emotions we can relate to from our teen years. She points to her being first-generation influencing her writing: “There are a lot of the cultural things that inspired aspects of Xiomara, like the ways in which who you are outside of your house is a little bit different than who you must be inside because of the cultural norms that exist. That push and pull that Xiomara carries of being first-generation is something I share.” (Publisher’s Weekly, 2018) Because of her own personal connection, her words evoke so much more meaning and carry weight of being something she has lived through.

Xiomara’s words haunted me at every moment I set down this book. A particularly impactful poem is In Front of My Locker (218). In the poem a boy at school grabs Xiomara inappropriately, and instead of waiting for her friend and crush Aman to say something, she has the realization of not needing to wait for anyone. In the poem In Front of My Locker we see Xiomara standing up for herself:

“For the first time since I can remember I wait.

I can’t fight today. Everything inside me feels beaten…

He’s not going to curse or throw a fit.

He’s not going to do a damn thing.

Because no one will take care of me but me.” (Acevedo, 219)

Xiomara is a girl to look up to, with her strength and dedication driving her actions, even when  everything inside her “feels beaten.” Her emotions are so raw and realistic, and from the first page I found myself cheering for Xiomara and her passion for life.

Acevedo excellently captures the struggles of being a minority teen in her novel, and I can see people everywhere being able to see some of themselves in Xiomara’s story.

“There is power in the word” Xiomara says, and yes, there is power in practically every word of Acevedo’s book. (Acevedo, 353)   

(SS)

Sources:

Acevedo, Elizabeth. The Poet X. HarperTeen, 2018.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/76224-q-a-with-elizabeth-acevedo.html

Introduction to Literature: Personal Accounts (II)

For this installment of my Introduction to Literature Series, I will be featuring Sequoia Stone. She is a second-year M.A. student in SDSU's English and Comparative Literature department, with a specialization in Children's Literature. This is her first semester teaching and her English 220 course is entitled "Reimagining Canon: Literary Confrontations, Adaptations, and Subversions." The following entries are from Sequoia herself!

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I'd had the idea for my syllabus knocking around in my head for a while, ever since I'd read one of my course texts (The Song of Achilles, a queer re-telling of The Illiad) right after reading The Illiad in a course during my senior year of college. While I knew I would have enjoyed The Song of Achilles on its own, reading it on the heel of The Illiad was a deeply illuminating experience. I understood The Illiad better (I read TSOA in six hours the night before my midterm or the course--whoops!), and I was able to approach The Song of Achilles with the tradition and history of The Illiad informing my reading. As I thought about becoming a professor in the far-off future, I thought I'd love the chance to put The Illiad and The Song of Achilles in conversation for my students. When I was presented with the opportunity to teach 220 here at SDSU, I took this initial parting and poured over the books in my library and memories of my undergraduate years in order to create my syllabus based around the idea of reading a "canon" book with a "non-canon" one. Some of these pairings were direct adaptations, while others were simply two texts that echoed similar themes and ideas.

1. What Children's and young adult books or texts were included in the reading list for your course? How were these texts received by the students?

I have eight course texts, four canon and four non-canon. All of my non-canon books are young adult novels: Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker, and Scott Westerfeld's Uglies. I have gotten mostly a positive response to these books, and they are often just as intellectually challenging to my students as the more dense canon texts. Something I would hear often is that reading the YA companion book made things we discussed in the canon text more accessible, as students were able to use more "relatable" texts as a way to retroactively understand things that might have been more austere in older novels.

2. What other texts lended themselves to discuss childhood and adolescence in nuanced ways that were either unexpected or surprising? 

Something that was surprising and delightful to me in my course was how concerned my students were with the interiority or backstory of a character. When reading Lord of the Flies, a student proposed that maybe Jack was so violence because he had a childhood, or was abused. Similarly, in Great Expectations in my class wondered if the villainous figure of Mrs. Joe was more so a product of her upbringing than anything else. While I like to steer these observations back into textual analysis, I enjoyed seeing my students approach these characters as so three-dimensional that they asked themselves, why are they the way they are? It seems that the importance of childhood, the impact of how one is raised, was at the forefront of my student's minds even when we were reading texts not specifically aimed at children or young adults.

3. How does your class's theme carry over to the matters of childhood and adolescence?

Something my class has emphasized throughout our semester has been the importance of familial bonds, and how the family unit impacts the way one grows. Many of our main characters have had abusive parents or families that encourage negativity, and a lot of our discussion has been based around following these characters as they navigate the repercussions of abuse, of cruelty, or of neglect. We have also talked a lot about found families, the family one creates that provides support or love, and how this constructed family illustrates the importance of things like kindness, generosity, and loyalty. As we've moved through our texts, we've also looked at the various ways in which society pressures children and young adults to conform. Whether this manifests as discouraging queerness, encouraging apathy, or dictating beauty standards, my class has talked extensively about the different ways the characters in our novels face crushing dominant ideologies, as well the ways in which it is possible to resist them.

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Thank you so much to Sequoia Stone for the robust commentary and amazing engagement with themes of childhood and adolescence!

-A. Elliott

Introduction to Literature: Personal Accounts (I)

As part of this blog, I wanted to dedicate a small set of short entries that detail the personal experiences of graduate students within our department who have taught English 220: Introduction to Literature. My goal is to highlight how children's and young adult texts are used in these introductory courses and how matters surrounding childhood, adolescence, and development become integral to these courses.

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What I (Alexander Elliott) found interesting in my own course was the fact that adolescence and childhood were at the forefront of discussion quite frequently, thus reflecting how my teaching and research go hand-in-hand. My course is centered on the concept of love and the affective implications surrounding that subject across different forms of literature and genres. Also, my students went to twitter to share their insights about the readings on Twitter using #love220ae in their posts. 

1. What children's and young adult books or texts were included in the reading list for your course? How were these texts received by the students?

One of the genres that I introduced into my course was young adult literature as a whole, but more specifically queer YA novels and their history. I taught my students about how these narratives came up within YA literature with John Donovan's 1969 novel, I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. Additionally, I explained the history of book materiality and the importance of book covers within YA literature. 

As a class, we read Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. With this novel many topics surround LGBTQ+ representation, Mexican-American identities, parental and familial influence on adolescents, and societal/cultural expectations were brought to the forefront of discussion.

Overall, my students were incredibly happy with the inclusion of this text because it engaged with complex subject matters, yet engaged them in a fun reading experience. They were interested in learning about how impactful and poignant the history of this genre truly is. Various students asked for more recommendations of this kind of literature, as well!

2. What other texts lended themselves to discuss childhood and adolescence in nuanced ways that were either unexpected or surprising?

I started the semester off with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and it was very interesting to see how the students discussed adolescence as a crucial part of the play without my prompting them to do so. Interestingly enough, other texts worked in a similar manner like McCarthy's The Road and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, where both texts were great in discussing how conceptions of childhood were complicated within speculative narratives. This often led to discussing how maturity and development need not work in a linear manner.

Another text, Vaughan and Staples' graphic novel Saga, also highlighted childhood and development as quite complicated especially because of the science-fiction element. Morrison's Sula served as a great novel to examine how two characters develop from their childhood into their adulthood, in that it gave our class a more prolonged discussion of difficulties in growing up at as a marginalized person within a real-world society.

3. How does your class's theme carry over to the matters of childhood and adolescence?

An overarching idea that has connected the texts is just how impactful familial relationships are in affecting the children and adolescent characters' interactions--be it romantic or platonic. Often time, the family structure (or lack thereof) and the surrounding environment that affect the young characters, results in changing the extent to which they are able to foster productive forms of kinship. Therefore, these family relationships are represented as having a clear impact in the affective component of the characters' later relationships. Overall, love is an abstract idea that cannot be rigidly defined and when childhood and adolescence are introduced, my class found it interesting to see how these stages in development were impactful on the later representations of these characters.

-A. Elliott