Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

On Saturday April 6, we discussed The Poet X  by Elizabeth Acevedo in honor of National Poetry Month. We took turns reading passages aloud during our discussion, experiencing the sounds of the poetry instead of just reading the works on paper. All of the excerpts of poems written below are the property of Elizabeth Acevedo.   The Poet X was written for Young Adults and has won the 2018 National Book Award. One of the themes in the book is how mothers are so fearful about what might happen to their daughters (at the hands of men) they want to place their daughters in a box and not let them breathe. Another theme is blatant sexual harassement of a 15 year old girl, sometimes by adult men. Xiomara (pronounced See-oh-MAH-ra) lives in the Dominican community in Harlem and although she hates the attention she gets from men because of her fully developed body, she yearns to know how it feels to kiss a boy. Last year we read another teen book written in prose:  Jason