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Guilt, Shame, and Religion

The feelings of guilt and shame mark many of Xiomara’s difficulties with her mother, starting from a very young age. At age 11, Xiomara learned to link her own body with intense feelings of shame because her mother clumsily managed the arrival of Xiomara’s first period. In her inexperience, Xiomara bought herself tampons without knowing how to use them. This decision horrified her mother, who hit Xiomara across the face. Mami felt at the time that tampons were only for women who were sexually active, and her actions only confused the innocent Xiomara.

Because Xiomara’s period arrived much earlier than Mami expected, Mami was perhaps not prepared for the change. Possibly, she was also frightened by the fact that her daughter was developing so quickly. No matter the explanation for Mami’s insensitive and borderline abusive behavior, Xiomara internalized her mother’s assertion that “[g]ood girls don’t wear tampones” (40). This early exchange may have initiated the intense conflicts that would soon characterize Xiomara’s relationship with her mother.

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essay about poet x

Courtney Vinopal Courtney Vinopal

  • Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/in-writing-her-first-novel-this-poet-turned-to-her-high-school-journal

In writing her first novel, this poet turned to her high school journal

In writing “The Poet X,” Elizabeth Acevedo drew heavily upon her own experience as a student growing up in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. She began writing at 8 years old, and was competing in poetry slams at 14.

While Acevedo, 32, had a national slam title under her belt by the time “The Poet X” was published, she hadn’t lost track of her early writing. One poem in the novel, titled “In Translation,” was lifted directly from her high school journal. The poem is directed at the mother of the book’s protagonist, Xiomara.

“My mouth cannot write you a white flag,” the first line reads. “It will never be a Bible verse.” Acevedo told the NewsHour the poem served as her “North Star” in regard to the novel’s voice.

“I wanted to make sure that emotionally, tonally, and in terms of the language of experience of the character that I didn’t stray from the heart of the story in trying to impress readers with my verse,” she wrote.

You’ll find more insight on “In Translation” in Acevedo’s annotations below.

From “The Poet X”

In Translation (1) My mouth cannot write you a white flag. It will never be a Bible verse. My mouth cannot be shaped into the apology you say both you and God deserve.

And you want to make it seem it’s my mouth’s entire fault. Because it was hungry, and silent, but what about your mouth:

how your lips are staples that pierce me quick and hard. (2)

And the words I never say are better left on my tongue since they would only have slammed against the closed door of your back.

Your silence furnishes a dark house. (3) But even at the risk of burning the moth always seeks the light.

  • This poem was one of the few that was directly lifted from my [high school] journal. It served as a kind of North Star in regards to voice—I wanted to make sure that emotionally, tonally, and in terms of the language of experience of the character that I didn’t stray from the heart of the story in trying to impress readers with my verse.
  • Something about these lines feel truly visceral. Perhaps the consonance in “lips” “staples” pierce,” and the sharp jab of those words.
  • I toggled back and forth when considering this line. The mixed metaphor is inescapable, and yet, the tangibility of silence, the weight of it, the stretch, the abyss, I think allows for silence to take up literal space, in the way perhaps an oversized and ugly couch might?

Courtney Vinopal is a general assignment reporter at the PBS NewsHour.

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essay about poet x

This poet wants brown girls to know they’re worthy of being the hero and the author

Poetry Mar 08

The Cowardice of Guernica

The literary magazine Guernica ’s decision to retract an essay about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reveals much about how the war is hardening human sentiment.

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In the days after October 7, the writer and translator Joanna Chen spoke with a neighbor in Israel whose children were frightened by the constant sound of warplanes. “I tell them these are good booms,” the neighbor said to Chen with a grimace. “I understood the subtext,” Chen wrote later in an essay published in Guernica magazine on March 4, titled “From the Edges of a Broken World.” The booms were, of course, the Israeli army bombing Gaza, part of a campaign that has left at least 30,000 civilians and combatants dead so far.

The moment is just one observation in a much longer meditative piece of writing in which Chen weighs her principles—she refused service in the Israeli military, for years has volunteered at a charity providing transportation for Palestinian children needing medical care, and works on Arabic and Hebrew translations to bridge cultural divides—against the more turbulent feelings of fear, inadequacy, and split allegiances that have cropped up for her after October 7, when 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in Hamas’s assault on Israel. But the conversation with the neighbor is a sharp, novelistic, and telling moment. The mother, aware of the perversity of recasting bombs killing children mere miles away as “good booms,” does so anyway because she is a mother, and her children are frightened. The act, at once callous and caring, will stay with me.

Not with the readers of Guernica , though. The magazine , once a prominent publication for fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, with a focus on global art and politics, quickly found itself imploding as its all-volunteer staff revolted over the essay. One of the magazine’s nonfiction editors posted on social media that she was leaving over Chen’s publication. “Parts of the essay felt particularly harmful and disorienting to read, such as the line where a person is quoted saying ‘I tell them these are good booms.’” Soon a poetry editor resigned as well, calling Chen’s essay a “horrific settler normalization essay”— settler here seeming to refer to all Israelis, because Chen does not live in the occupied territories. More staff members followed, including the senior nonfiction editor and one of the co-publishers (who criticized the essay as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism”). Amid this flurry of cascading outrage, on March 10 Guernica pulled the essay from its website, with the note: “ Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” As of today, this explanation is still pending, and my request for comment from the editor in chief, Jina Moore Ngarambe, has gone unanswered.

Read: Beware the language that erases reality

Blowups at literary journals are not the most pressing news of the day, but the incident at Guernica reveals the extent to which elite American literary outlets may now be beholden to the narrowest polemical and moralistic approaches to literature. After the publication of Chen’s essay, a parade of mutual incomprehension occurred across social media, with pro-Palestine writers announcing what they declared to be the self-evident awfulness of the essay (publishing the essay made Guernica “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness,” wrote one of the now-former editors), while reader after reader who came to it because of the controversy—an archived version can still be accessed—commented that they didn’t understand what was objectionable. One reader seemed to have mistakenly assumed that Guernica had pulled the essay in response to pressure from pro-Israel critics. “Oh buddy you can’t have your civilian population empathizing with the people you’re ethnically cleansing,” he wrote, with obvious sarcasm. When another reader pointed out that he had it backwards, he responded, “This chain of events is bizarre.”

Some people saw anti-Semitism in the decision. James Palmer, a deputy editor of Foreign Policy , noted how absurd it was to suggest that the author approved of the “good bombs” sentiment, and wrote that the outcry was “one step toward trying to exclude Jews from discourse altogether.” And it is hard not to see some anti-Semitism at play. One of the resigning editors claimed that the essay “includes random untrue fantasies about Hamas and centers the suffering of oppressors” (Chen briefly mentions the well-documented atrocities of October 7; caring for an Israeli family that lost a daughter, son-in-law, and nephew; and her worries about the fate of Palestinians she knows who have links to Israel).

Madhuri Sastry, one of the co-publishers, notes in her resignation post that she’d earlier successfully insisted on barring a previous essay of Chen’s from the magazine’s Voices on Palestine compilation. In that same compilation, Guernica chose to include an interview with Alice Walker, the author of a poem that asks “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews,” and who once recommended to readers of The New York Times a book that claims that “a small Jewish clique” helped plan the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust. No one at Guernica publicly resigned over the magazine’s association with Walker.

However, to merely dismiss all of the critics out of hand as insane or intolerant or anti-Semitic would ironically run counter to the spirit of Chen’s essay itself. She writes of her desire to reach out to those on the other side of the conflict, people she’s worked with or known and who would be angered or horrified by some of the other experiences she relates in the essay, such as the conversation about the “good booms.” Given the realities of the conflict, she knows this attempt to connect is just a first step, and an often-frustrating one. Writing to a Palestinian she’d once worked with as a reporter, she laments her failure to come up with something meaningful to say: “I also felt stupid—this was war, and whether I liked it or not, Nuha and I were standing at opposite ends of the very bridge I hoped to cross. I had been naive … I was inadequate.” In another scene, she notes how even before October 7, when groups of Palestinians and Israelis joined together to share their stories, their goodwill failed “to straddle the chasm that divided us.”

Read: Why activism leads to so much bad writing

After the publication of Chen’s essay, one writer after another pulled their work from the magazine. One wrote, “I will not allow my work to be curated alongside settler angst,” while another, the Texas-based Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah, wrote that Chen’s essay “is humiliating to Palestinians in any time let alone during a genocide. An essay as if a dispatch from a colonial century ago. Oh how good you are to the natives.” I find it hard to read the essay that way, but it would be a mistake, as Chen herself suggests, to ignore such sentiments. For those who more naturally sympathize with the Israeli mother than the Gazan hiding from the bombs, these responses exist across that chasm Chen describes, one that empathy alone is incapable of bridging.

That doesn’t mean empathy isn’t a start, though. Which is why the retraction of the article is more than an act of cowardice and a betrayal of a writer whose work the magazine shepherded to publication. It’s a betrayal of the task of literature, which cannot end wars but can help us see why people wage them, oppose them, or become complicit in them.

Empathy here does not justify or condemn. Empathy is just a tool. The writer needs it to accurately depict their subject; the peacemaker needs it to be able to trace the possibilities for negotiation; even the soldier needs it to understand his adversary. Before we act, we must see war’s human terrain in all its complexity, no matter how disorienting and painful that might be. Which means seeing Israelis as well as Palestinians—and not simply the mother comforting her children as the bombs fall and the essayist reaching out across the divide, but far harsher and more unsettling perspectives. Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their reasons. If your journal can’t publish work that deals with such messy realities, then your editors might as well resign, because you’ve turned your back on literature.

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Reading Sanskrit

Michael Ondaatje’s “Definition,” a poem about reading a Sanskrit dictionary, took me back to the five years that I spent studying the language at the University of Chicago (Poems, February 12th & 19th). I still have my Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English dictionary (which I assume is the one that Ondaatje is referring to), and I flip through it from time to time because its entries are like poems unto themselves.

Studying this ancient language has kept me curious for more than thirty years. Some Sanskrit poems use a literary device of intended secondary meanings, and that makes reading them a fun and reflective experience. When Ondaatje writes, “Wherever you turn / definitions push open a door,” he evokes the variegated ways that people communicate; his poem reminds us that, if we work to decipher and embrace multiple meanings, we can enter new worlds.

Anna Hammond New York City

High Supply

As a longtime California cannabis cultivator, both before and after decriminalization, I found the comments by New Yorkers in Jia Tolentino’s piece about legalization strikingly similar to those that Californians have made over the years (“In the Weeds,” February 26th). Eli Northrup, a public defender who held the first meeting of the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, said that New York is not basing its program “on any existing model.” Yet choosing not to study the successes and failures of other states is to risk repeating the latter.

On both coasts, candidates for licenses have faced far too much red tape; at the same time, the legalization of weed, which added taxes and jacked up the price per ounce, gave a shot in the arm to the illicit economy, which offers lower prices. Albany and Sacramento would have done well to turn to experts in the underground market for help navigating the specifics of marijuana cultivation, distribution, and sales. State and local leaders seem to have greatly underestimated the time, energy, and creativity necessary to bring a formerly prohibited activity to Main Street and to Wall Street.

Jonah Raskin San Francisco, Calif.

Tolentino, in her otherwise informative article about the chaotic opening of New York’s market for legal marijuana, risks perpetuating reefer madness when she writes, “Several products advertised a truly terrifying potency: one bag of peach gummy rings from the California brand Smashed supposedly contained two hundred and fifty milligrams of THC per gummy, enough to send a devoted stoner like myself to the emergency room.” I also found two hundred and fifty milligrams to be too much for one gummy. So I cut it in half.

William deJong-Lambert New York City

Burned and Banned

Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her article about the role of books during wartime, mentions a U.S. Office of War Information poster showing a photograph of a book burning with the caption “ THE NAZIS BURNED THESE BOOKS  . . . but free Americans CAN STILL READ THEM ” (Books, February 26th). That photograph appears to depict books looted from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, known for its pioneering research on sexuality and its advocacy for homosexuals, transgender people, and women. Today, in many states, fewer and fewer “free Americans” have unrestricted access to similar books.

Michael Ward Costa Mesa, Calif.

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Guest Essay

The Unforgivable Silence on Sudan

A Sudanese woman who fled the conflict in Murnei in Sudan’s Darfur region carries a baby on her back and walks beside horse-drawn carts carrying her family belongings.

By Linda Thomas-Greenfield

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Silence. Last September, when I visited a makeshift hospital in Adré, Chad, where young Sudanese refugees were being treated for acute malnutrition, that was all I heard: an eerie silence.

I had tried to prepare myself for the wails of children who were sick and emaciated, but these patients were too weak to even cry. That day, I saw a 6-month-old baby who was the size of a newborn and a child whose ankles were swollen, and whose body was blistered, from severe malnourishment.

It was equal parts newly horrific and tragically familiar.

Twenty years earlier I had visited the same town and met with Sudanese refugees who fled violence in Darfur, where the janjaweed militia, with backing from Omar al-Bashir’s brutal authoritarian regime, carried out a genocidal campaign of mass killing, rape and pillage.

Today, civil war has once again turned Sudan into a living hell. But even after aid groups designated the country’s humanitarian crisis to be among the world’s worst, little attention or help has gone to the Sudanese people.

For almost a year, I have been pushing the United Nations Security Council to speak out. On March 8, the Council finally called for an immediate cessation of hostilities. This is a positive step, but it is not nearly enough — and it does not change the fact that the international community and media outlets have been largely quiet.

The world’s silence and inaction need to end, and end now.

The first thing that must happen is we must send a surge of humanitarian support to Sudan’s most vulnerable. Eighteen million Sudanese face acute hunger, and famine is looming . Nearly eight million people have been forced from their homes in what has become the world’s largest internal displacement crisis. Measles, cholera and other preventable diseases have spread.

Since the start of this conflict, humanitarian workers have been on the ground, often putting their lives at risk to save others, but combatants on both sides of the war have deliberately undermined their efforts. The Sudanese Armed Forces has impeded the major humanitarian aid crossing from Chad into Darfur, and members of the rival Rapid Support Forces are looting humanitarian warehouses.

Regional and global leaders must unequivocally and publicly demand that the warring parties respect international humanitarian law and facilitate humanitarian access. If the parties don’t listen, the Security Council must take swift action to ensure lifesaving aid is delivered and distributed. The Council should consider all tools at its disposal, including authorizing aid to move from Chad and South Sudan into Sudan, as the United Nations has done with cross-border aid into Syria. The United States is prepared to help lead this initiative.

We also believe that the United Nations should appoint a senior humanitarian official based outside Sudan to advocate humanitarian access, scale up relief efforts and mobilize international donors. The World Food Program warned that, unless new funds come in, it will be forced to cut off food assistance to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees in Chad as early as next month. Just a tiny fraction of the United Nations’ humanitarian appeal for Sudan has been met. This is unacceptable. The United States is the largest single donor nation to both efforts. Now other countries need to step up.

The international community must also demand the protection of civilians and pursue justice for victims of war crimes.

In the 2023 Elie Wiesel Act Report , the Biden administration warned of continuing reports of large-scale human rights abuses in Sudan. And in December, Secretary of State Antony Blinken determined that fighters on both sides had committed war crimes and that members of the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias had committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

When I visited the Sudanese border last year, I announced U.S. sanctions on militia leaders who carried out abuses against civilians, including conflict-related sexual violence and ethnic-based killings. Since then, we have issued several more rounds of targeted sanctions.

We must break the cycle of impunity. We must demand accountability for those responsible for the horrors playing out before our eyes — horrors that are documented, in gruesome detail, in a recently released U.N. report . Investigators found that women and girls, some as young as 14, have been brutally raped by Rapid Support Forces militiamen, that the group’s snipers have indiscriminately targeted civilians and that entire villages have been burned down and their people massacred, among other atrocities. Late last year, according to the report, more than 1,000 Masalit and other non-Arab minorities were slaughtered in Ardamata, a village in West Darfur.

We should all stand behind the International Criminal Court’s continuing investigation into allegations of war crimes in the region, local and international documentation efforts and other accountability initiatives.

Finally, we need to do everything in our power to stop the fighting and get Sudan back on the path to democracy.

Right now, a handful of regional powers are sending weapons into Sudan. This outside support is prolonging the conflict and enabling the atrocities taking place across West Darfur, including massacres reminiscent of the 2004 genocide. The Security Council has made clear that these illegal arms transfers, which violate the United Nations’ arms embargo, must stop.

This conflict will not be solved on the battlefield. It will be solved at the negotiating table. Those with influence, particularly the African Union and leaders across East Africa and the Persian Gulf, must push the warring parties toward peace.

The Biden administration will continue to support these diplomatic efforts. Just last month, Secretary Blinken appointed Tom Perriello, who has significant experience in the region, as the U.S. special envoy to Sudan.

The United States is working to persuade relevant players to coalesce around the shared goal of preventing the breakup of Sudan, which would fuel instability across the Horn of Africa and Red Sea region. We are also working with courageous grass-roots leaders to build momentum toward a better future, in which the Sudanese people can realize their aspirations of a civilian, democratically elected government.

Through the sounds of gunfire and shelling, the people of Sudan have heard our silence. They ask why they have been forsaken; why they have been forgotten.

The international community must, at long last, speak out — and work together to end this senseless conflict.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

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by Elizabeth Acevedo

The poet x essay questions.

What does Elizabeth Acevedo mean when she says, “The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it”?

There is nothing as painful as asking unanswerable questions. Besides satisfying inquisitiveness, answerable questions increase human knowledge and creativity. However, Acevedo implies that asking impenetrable questions that are beyond human reckoning will end up overburdoning our souls. Some questions make human beings see the world as complex and unfair because of what they go through in their lives. Therefore, trying to understand everything about the world can be devastating to our lives. We will have questions without answers making us annoyed and unsatisfied. However, if people stop asking hard questions about earth, life becomes more enjoyable and stress-free.

How does Xiomara's relationship with her mother evolve over the course of the novel?

A teenage girl's relationship with her mother is naturally complicated, but Xiomara and Mami's seems particularly fraught. Mami is incredibly strict, judgmental, unyielding, and even cruel to her daughter. At the beginning of the novel they are in a sort of stasis, with Xiomara knowing exactly how she has to act to preclude punishment. However, this is untenable. Xiomara is growing up and wants to learn who she is, what she wants, and how to express herself. Her mother's beliefs and rules seem increasingly absurd and punitive and Xiomara pushes back at them more and more. There is an ebb with the subway kissing incident and a bit of a flow with the holidays, but their relationship troubles come to a head in January when Mami finds her notebook. This, and Xiomara's subsequent running away, force a confrontation where the two finally begin to deal with their issues. Though they are not particularly close by the end of the novel, they are working on things and the overall note is an optimistic one.

Why does Xiomara move from wanting to keep her poems private to reciting them in front of others?

Initially Xiomara is mostly horrified at the thought of reading her work out loud. It is too much a part of herself to expose to the world; she feels too vulnerable, too unsure of how others will feel about her unfettered thoughts and feelings. Yet as time passes, her supportive teacher, poetry club peers, brother, and best friend encourage her to share her work with the world. She watches a video of a female poet and sees Chris, one of the other students from the club, perform, which makes her start to think about doing it herself. She comes to think that her words might be helpful to others who are feeling the same things. She sees that art is a naturally terrifying and wondrous thing and that it is worth the risk.

How does Xiomara feel about her body, and why?

Xiomara is tall and voluptuous, and has been since she was young. Men of all ages constantly comment upon her body and sometimes take the liberty to touch her without her permission. Most of the time this makes her feel exposed, vulnerable, angry, and ashamed. This is exacerbated by her mother's extreme religiosity which blames women for making men "sin." However, occasionally, and against her will, she feels a twinge of excitement because she is coming to terms with her sexuality and her desire to be desired. This is a very nuanced portrait of how a woman can feel when she is the object of unsolicited attention.

Why does Xiomara retreat into silence in the middle of the novel?

Xiomara is used to words—to being opinionated and bold, to getting in people's faces when they harass her or her brother, to speaking up around her friends and her boyfriend and even questioning the Catholic teachings that she's been raised with. However, after she is caught kissing Aman and is cruelly punished by her mother, she retreats into silence. She feels diminished, invisible. She does not want to her use her physical voice anymore because she feels like no one cares what she has to say. The only voice she is comfortable with is the private one she uses in her writing, and it will take a lot of growth to move beyond her silent phase.

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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

essay about poet x

essay about poet x

Elizabeth Acevedo

Everything you need for every book you read..

Sexuality and Shame Theme Icon

The Poet X follows 15-year-old Xiomara , a second-generation Dominican American living in Harlem. In part because of Xiomara’s upbringing in the Catholic Church and in part because of her family’s Dominican traditions, Xiomara’s sexual coming of age is something that she, as a curious and questioning teen, can’t ignore—but it’s something that disturbs her mother, Mami , and that Mami tries her hardest to squash. As Xiomara begins a romantic relationship with her lab partner, Aman , she must therefore try to reconcile what she hears about sex at home with her own desire for a physical relationship. Her family’s shame only makes Xiomara feel even more alone in the world; by comparing how she’s expected to behave with how her father, Papi , is allowed to behave, Xiomara recognizes that as a young woman, she can’t win. The novel thus makes it clear that shame, especially when it comes to one’s sexuality, encourages double standards and causes people to feel needlessly anxious, guilty, and insecure.

Since beginning to develop physically at age 11, Xiomara has had a difficult relationship with her body. She writes that her body seemed to develop out of nowhere and now, at age 15, Xiomara is taller than lots of boys and very curvy. While this is something that plenty of young women go through during puberty, Xiomara isn’t given any of the tools or the knowledge to understand her body—or, for that matter, to celebrate it. Instead, Xiomara wants to make herself small so that she can ignore the parts of her body that attract attention, and at home, Mami makes it very to clear to Xiomara that with a woman’s body, it is Xiomara’s responsibility to minimize her body’s importance and protect herself from unwanted advances. The one major event that solidified Xiomara’s belief that she needs to minimize her body came when she started menstruating. Xiomara knew that the “time of the month” was something that women experienced, but she had no idea what that meant and thus wasn’t prepared to deal with her own period. Then, when Xiomara purchased tampons and asked Mami for help about how to insert them properly, Mami slapped her and accused her of being sexually promiscuous. This event made Xiomara feel extremely ashamed of her body, thanks to the combination of not knowing what was happening and then being completely blindsided by Mami’s reaction when she did figure it out. This incident reflects Mami’s belief that Xiomara’s growing body, and later Xiomara’s budding sexuality, is something to be controlled by Mami, not by Xiomara herself.

In addition to being made to feel as though she has no agency over her body or sexuality, Xiomara is told again and again that when men catcall her, it’s her fault and she needs to stop it. However, Xiomara recognizes that men speak crudely to her regardless of what she’s wearing, saying, or doing. Especially considering how Xiomara sees that men—especially her own father, Papi—are treated and spoken about in terms of their sexuality, Xiomara is reminded constantly that she and other women have little say over what happens to their bodies. In his younger years—that is, before Xiomara and Twin were born—Papi was a known philanderer who drank in bars, slept with many women, and inappropriately touched others. Yet Xiomara recognizes that Mami scolds and punishes her for not being able to deflect the advances of the next generation of men like Papi. In effect, Mami excuses the actions of men like Papi and the drug dealers who catcall Xiomara to instead pin the blame on these men’s female targets.

Xiomara encapsulates her understanding of this double standard when she explains the word cuero , which is the Dominican slang term for a promiscuous woman. She notes that the term can be applied to quite literally any woman who, for any reason or no reason, seems inappropriately sexual. No such term exists for men, even if there’s clear evidence of sexual activity or desire. Through this term, Xiomara is further conditioned to believe that female sexuality isn’t okay under any circumstances, while male sexuality is something that’s not only acceptable, but even celebrated.

All of this becomes extremely difficult for Xiomara to make sense of when she begins to spend time with her lab partner, Aman, and finds herself wanting to experiment sexually with him. Because of what Xiomara has been told at home about kissing and sex, she wonders if even being curious is a horrible crime, and this makes her feel even more conflicted about her relationship with Aman. Because of the shame that Xiomara feels about her body and her desire to experiment, she struggles to genuinely enjoy things with Aman, especially after the fact. With this, the novel shows clearly how shame can rob individuals of pleasure. However, Xiomara also writes that Aman makes her body, which she usually feels is too big and too sexy no matter what she does, feel good and like something she should be proud of. This realization, combined with Xiomara’s questioning of why kissing, masturbating, and other sexual contact is so bad if it feels good, ultimately leads her to begin rejecting Mami’s teachings about sex and bodies. By questioning the shameful attitudes towards sex that she has been taught, Xiomara is able to begin putting together her own understanding of how to conduct herself in a sexual relationship.

Importantly, once Xiomara begins to shrug off some of the shame that she connects to her body and her sexuality (and after Mami burns her poetry notebook , which destroys Xiomara’s trust in Mami and her beliefs), Xiomara begins to feel more confident in a number of other ways. She even agrees to open up a conversation with Mami about their relationship. Though the novel ties Xiomara’s shame most clearly to sex, it also suggests that shame about anything can make a person less confident overall. On the other hand, developing confidence, self-respect, and the courage to make one’s own decisions gives a person the tools to let go of their shame, and in turn lead a happier and less anxious life.

Sexuality and Shame ThemeTracker

The Poet X PDF

Sexuality and Shame Quotes in The Poet X

The other girls call me conceited. Ho. Thot. Fast. When your body takes up more room than your voice you are always the target of well-aimed rumors, which is why I let my knuckles talk for me. Which is why I learned to shrug when my name was replaced by insults.

Religion and Coming of Age Theme Icon

And I get all this attention from guys but it’s like a sancocho of emotions.

This stew of mixed-up ingredients: partly flattered they think I’m attractive, partly scared they’re only interested in my ass and boobs, and a good measure of Mami-will-kill-me fear sprinkled on top.

essay about poet x

What if I like a boy too much and none of those things happen... they’re the only scales I have.

How does a girl like me figure out the weight of what it means to love a boy?

“Good girls don’t wear tampones. Are you still a virgin? Are you having relations?”

I didn’t know how to answer her, I could only cry. She shook her head and told me to skip church that day. Threw away the box of tampons, saying they were for cueros. That she would buy me pads. Said eleven was too young. That she would pray on my behalf.

I didn’t understand what she was saying. But I stopped crying. I licked at my split lip. I prayed for the bleeding to stop.

And I knew then what I’d known since my period came: my body was trouble. I had to pray the trouble out of the body God gave me. My body was a problem. And I didn’t want any of these boys to be the ones to solve it. I wanted to forget I had this body at all.

He grins at me and shrugs. “I came here and practiced a lot. My pops never wanted to put me in classes. Said it was too soft.”

And now his smile is a little sad. And I think about all the things we could be if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.

I don’t yell how the whole block whispers when I walk down the street about all the women who made a cuero out of him.

But men are never called cueros.

I’ll be anything that makes sense of this panic. I’ll loosen myself from this painful flesh.

See, a cuero is any skin. A cuero is just a covering. A cuero is a loose thing. Tied down by no one. Fluttering and waving in the wind. Flying. Flying. Gone.

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  1. The Poet X: Study Guide

    The Poet X is a 2018 coming-of-age novel-in-verse by Elizabeth Acevedo. The young adult novel is told from the viewpoint of Xiomara Batista, a fifteen-year-old Dominican American living in Harlem in New York City who calls herself "X" or "Xio.". Presented as Xiomara's collection of poetry, the novel traces Xiomara's struggle to make ...

  2. The Poet X Essays

    The Poet X. Adolescence alone, as a transitional period from child to adult, marks a challenging time in an individual's life. Often times, factors outside the mind and body seem to exist solely to aggravate this tremulous, question-filled period. Poet X 's... The Poet X essays are academic essays for citation.

  3. The Poet X Study Guide

    In 2018, The Poet X was one of the most-ordered books at the New York Public Library and it also won several awards, including the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The best study guide to The Poet X on the planet, from the creators of SparkNotes. Get the summaries, analysis, and quotes you need.

  4. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo Plot Summary

    The Poet X Summary. Next. Part I. 15-year-old Xiomara sits on the stoop of her building in Harlem in the last week before school starts. Even the drug dealers seem more pleasant as they catcall her. Xiomara sneaks back upstairs before Mami gets home from work. Xiomara explains that she's tall, curvy, and gets a lot of attention on the street ...

  5. The Poet X Summary

    The Poet X Summary. Xiomara is a fifteen-year-old Dominican-American girl living in Harlem with her twin brother Xavier (she calls him "Twin"), her indifferent Papi, and her religious and strict Mami. She grapples with normal teenage-girl issues, such as her identity, her body, boys, and questions regarding religion.

  6. The Poet X Analysis

    Analysis. Last Updated September 5, 2023. The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo, is a profound, delightful, and moving novel about a girl's coming-of-age experience. The protagonist, Xiomara Batista ...

  7. The Poet X Study Guide

    by Elizabeth Acevedo. The Poet X Study Guide. Published in 2018, The Poet X is a young adult realistic fiction novel by Dominican-American poet and author Elizabeth Acevedo. The novel—specifically the protagonist Xiomara, who goes by "X"—draws on Acevedo's own experience growing up in New York City as the child of Dominican immigrants.

  8. The Poet X Essay Topics

    Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Poet X" by Elizabeth Acevedo. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

  9. The Poet X Themes

    The Poet X follows 15-year-old Xiomara, a second-generation Dominican American living in Harlem.In part because of Xiomara's upbringing in the Catholic Church and in part because of her family's Dominican traditions, Xiomara's sexual coming of age is something that she, as a curious and questioning teen, can't ignore—but it's something that disturbs her mother, Mami, and that Mami ...

  10. The Poet X: Identity Through Expression

    From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes The Poet X Study Guide has everything you need to ace quizzes, tests, and essays. Search all of SparkNotes Search. ... Xiomara concludes the final draft of her first essay for Ms. Galiano, with this quote. In the essay, Xiomara writes about Twin's ...

  11. The Poet X 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 ...

  12. The Poet X Themes

    Discussion of themes and motifs in Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X. eNotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of The Poet X so you can excel on your essay or test.

  13. The Poet X Summary

    The Poet X is a book that defies categorization as it is a work of fiction but it is written exclusively in poetry form, much like Jason Reynolds's A Long Way Down.The unique format of the book ...

  14. The Poet X Themes

    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

  15. The Poet X Themes

    Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Poet X" by Elizabeth Acevedo. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

  16. The Poet X: Full Book Summary

    The Poet X Full Book Summary. The protagonist, Xiomara, is a fifteen-year-old Dominican American about to start tenth grade. Xiomara is tall and curvy, and as she sits on the stoop in front of her Brooklyn home, her developing, shapely body earns her unwanted sexual attention from the men and drug dealers on her street. Xiomara's mother, Mami ...

  17. In writing her first novel, this poet turned to her high school ...

    In writing "The Poet X," Elizabeth Acevedo drew heavily upon her own experience as a student growing up in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. She began writing at 8 years old ...

  18. Guernica Magazine Retracts Essay by Israeli as Staffers Quit

    In an essay titled "From the Edges of a Broken World," Joanna Chen, a translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry and prose, had written about her experiences trying to bridge the divide with ...

  19. Family, Abuse, and Expectations Theme in The Poet X

    Family, Abuse, and Expectations. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Poet X, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Xiomara 's home life is wildly dysfunctional and, at times, extremely abusive—if Xiomara in particular doesn't follow Mami 's rules to the letter, Mami hits her.

  20. "Edward Hopper (Yellow and Red)"

    Poetry by W. S. Di Piero: "The windows inflect an ethic of the watched, / the overseen, the secretive." ... Selected Essays" in 2025. Weekly. Enjoy our flagship newsletter as a digest ...

  21. The Poet X Essay

    Discovering Self Worth through Spoken Word in "The Poet X" Olivia F. Vega 11th Grade. In Elizabeth Acevedo's young adult novel, The Poet X, fifteen-year old Dominican-American Xiomara Batista describes her aspirations and personal life experiences in the form of poetic verse. Through her narration the reader learns that Xiomara's ...

  22. The Cowardice of Guernica

    Soon a poetry editor resigned as well, calling Chen's essay a "horrific settler normalization essay"—settler here seeming to refer to all Israelis, because Chen does not live in the ...

  23. The Mail

    Letters respond to Michael Ondaatje's poem "Definition," Jia Tolentino's piece about weed legalization, and Claudia Roth Pierpont's essay about books in wartime.

  24. Religion and Coming of Age Theme in The Poet X

    Importantly, The Poet X doesn't try to make the case that religion is unequivocally bad or oppressive, even though it often seems that way to Xiomara. Instead, the novel proposes that part of a young person's coming-of-age journey should necessarily include asking questions about the belief systems that they were raised with, and ultimately ...

  25. Opinion

    Ms. Thomas-Greenfield is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Silence. Last September, when I visited a makeshift hospital in Adré, Chad, where young Sudanese refugees were being treated ...

  26. The Poet X Essay Questions

    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

  27. Sexuality and Shame Theme in The Poet X

    The Poet X follows 15-year-old Xiomara, a second-generation Dominican American living in Harlem.In part because of Xiomara's upbringing in the Catholic Church and in part because of her family's Dominican traditions, Xiomara's sexual coming of age is something that she, as a curious and questioning teen, can't ignore—but it's something that disturbs her mother, Mami, and that Mami ...

  28. Sophie Turner Requests to 'Reactivate' Joe Jonas Divorce

    Sophie Turner has just filed court papers to "reactivate" her divorce case with ex Joe Jonas. In the docs obtained by People magazine, her legal team noted, "The abatement has come to an end ...