Xiomara Batista is The Poet X, a fifteen-year-old Dominican-American girl living in New York City with her twin brother, her devout Christian mother, and her (emotionally) distant father. The Poet X reads like Xiomara's journal, written in verse as her preferred form of self-expression. We get a peek into Xiomara's mental wrestling matches as she attends confirmation classes, discovers a poetry club after school that conflicts with church, develops a crush on her lab partner, Aman, and conspires with her best friend and brother to fool her mother.

Xiomara struggles with god, struggles with romance, struggles with friendships, struggles with family, struggles with school, and [a:Elizabeth Acevedo|15253645|Elizabeth Acevedo|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1598302475p2/15253645.jpg] beautifully inhabits her perspective to tell an absolutely stunning story (perhaps even better by her narration of the audiobook). All of the relationships were so believably, and the short-form poems revealed such a depth of character without need for excessive description or exposition. Everyone was complicated and human, and I was entirely captivated by the story the entire time.