Elizabeth Acevedo’s poems are vibrant, rhythmic, and deeply rooted in the lived realities of Afro-Latina identity. Her work blends spoken-word energy with lyrical sensitivity, creating poems that feel both intimate and powerful. Acevedo often explores themes of heritage, womanhood, family, and the complexities of growing up between cultures. Her lines celebrate Dominican roots, Afro-descendant beauty, and the strength of women who carry generational stories in their bodies and voices.
A distinctive feature of her poetry is its musicality—she uses cadence, repetition, and performance-style phrasing to make the words pulse like a heartbeat. Poems such as those found in The Poet X show how young women fight for their own voice in a world that tries to silence them. Her imagery is bold and sensory, often mixing food, language, memory, and the Harlem streets where she grew up.
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| Elizabeth acevedo |
Acevedo also writes about love, faith, and self-discovery, but always through a lens of empowerment. Her poems highlight the emotional struggles of girls navigating expectations, religion, and desire, yet they ultimately affirm resilience and identity. Overall, Elizabeth Acevedo’s poetry is a testament to the beauty of multicultural experience—fierce, honest, and full of life.
Hair
My mother tells me to fix my hair.
And by “fix” she means straighten. She means whiten.
But how do you fix this ship-wrecked history of hair?
The true meaning of stranded, when trusses held tight like African cousins in ship bellies, did they imagine that their great-grand-children would look like us, and would hate them how we do? Trying to find ways to erase them out of our skin, iron them out of our hair, this wild tangle of hair that strangles air.
You call them wild curls. I call them breathing. Ancestors spiraling.
Can’t you see them in this wet hair that waves like hello?
And they say Dominicans can do the best hair. I mean they wash, set, flatten the spring in any lock — but what they mean is we’re the best at swallowing amnesia, in a cup of morÃsoñando[1], die dreaming because we’d rather do that than live in this reality, caught between orange juice and milk, between reflections of the sun and whiteness.
What they mean is, “Why would you date a black man?” What they mean is, “a prieto cocolo” What they mean is, “Why would two oppressed people come together? It’s two times the trouble.” What they really mean is, “Have you thought of your daughter’s hair?”
And I don’t tell them that we love like sugar cane, brown skin, pale flesh, meshed in pure sweetness. The children of children of fields. Our bodies curve into one another like an echo, and I let my curtain of curls blanket us from the world, how our children will be beautiful. Of dust skin, and diamond eyes. Hair, a reclamation.
How I will braid pride down their back so from the moment they leave the womb they will be born in love with themselves.
Momma that tells me to fix my hair, and so many words remain unspoken. Because all I can reply is, “You can’t fix what was never broken.”
Ode to the Head Nod
the slight angling up of the forehead
neck extension quick jut of chin
meeting the strangers’ eyes
a gilded curtsy to the sunfill in another
in yourself tithe of respect
in an early version the copy editor deleted
the word “head” from the title
the copy editor says it’s implied
the copy editor means well
the copy editor means
she is only fluent in one language of gestures
i do not explain i feel sad for her
limited understanding of greetings & maybe
this is why my acknowledgements are so long;
didn’t we learn this early?
to look at white spaces
& find the color
thank god o thank god for
you
are here.
A Daughter Named After Nina
voice of incoming 2 express train
pray herself altar
contort mouth shotgun:
sawed off a saw
soften tongue songbird
hands mosaicked mirrors
donning skin like battle gear
dawning skin like evening gown
this name pinned on her shoulders;
a heavy mantle. an incantation.
Iron
And although I am a poet, I am not the bullet;
I will not heat-search the soft points.
I am not the coroner who will graze her hand
over naked knees. Who will swish her fingers
in the mouth. Who will flip the body over, her eye a hook
fishing for government-issued lead.
I am not the sidewalk, which is unsurprised
as another cheek scrapes harsh against it.
Although I too enjoy soft palms on me;
enjoy when he rests on my body with a hard breath;
I have clasped
this man inside me and released him again and again,
listening to him die thousands of little deaths.
What is a good metaphor for a woman who loves in a time like this?
I am no scalpel or high thread count sheet. Not a gavel, or hand-painted teacup.
I am neither nor romanced by the streetlamp nor candlelight;
my hands are not an iron, but look, they’re hot, look
how I place them in love on his skin
and am still able to unwrinkle his spine.
After He’s Decided to Leave
When the bottle of hot sauce shattered in the kitchen
he stood in the doorframe, shook his head at the mess.
Not worried if I was injured,
mostly curious at what else it was I’d broken.
You are so clumsy with the things you hold,
he never said.
The red stain on my chest bloomed pungent,
soaked any apology.
I used his shirt, the one I slept in,
to wipe the counter and pale-colored kitchen floor.
That night and the next for a straight week
as he prepared boxes to leave
I hunched and scrubbed the tiles. Couldn’t rid myself
of the things that I’d sullied, of the look he left behind.
