The Bible as Literature: Interpretative Communities and Emancipatory Reading Strategies in Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X.

Critical commentary on Elizabeth Acevedo's celebrated verse novel The Poet X (2018) focuses on main character Xiomara Batista's authorship of diaries and spoken word poetry as the creative activities that spur what Meghan Dougherty Kuehnle refers to as the "reclamation of bodily agency" through "poetic empowerment." By contrast, this essay focuses on Xiomara as a reader. Acevedo's verse novel engages with reception issues including the concept of "interpretive communities," and the relationship between participatory reading strategies and the liberatory act of spoken word performance. Access to voice, I contend, is contingent upon her shift in association from one "interpretive community" to another. To be specific, Xiomara rejects the literalist reading of Bible associated with her mother, Mami, whose wish to become a nun in the Dominican Republic became foiled when she emigrated to Spanish Harlem to marry Xiomara's father. To use terms the late poet and theorist Lyn Hejinian applied to avant-garde poetry in "The Rejection of Closure," Xiomara encounters biblical discourse as an "open text," or one that poetry scholar Jennifer Ashton describes as "refus[ing] the autonomy of the work of art by calling upon the beholder (or reader) to participate in its situation--indeed, to create its situation." Most certainly, The Poet X is a Künstlerroman, or story of an artist's coming to maturity. My contribution to discussion about this celebrated work, however, centers on Xiomara's reading strategies. Reading scripture as an open text becomes the key to her emancipation from what she regards as the prison-house of church doctrine that stymied her creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]