Wild unites poetry explorations in three spheres: nature, gender, and mental health. The poetics are especially focused on the reactions wildness inspires, noting how women and queer folk are treated and the effects of suppression, alongside the similar effects of parallel taming in nature and within the mental health system. We find poems that both exalt the healing effects of allowing people, nature, and minds to exist freely, as well as poems condemning the ways in which we are harming our world and communities. This is an irreverent collection that celebrates rebellion against sexism, destruction of nature, and harmful medical practices. Poems like demonstrate "Opium and Arsenic" how women's bodies continue to be made sick because of practices that make our environments sick, showing that these systems of harm overlap. At the same time, poems like "Chicama" promote mental well-being by incorporating the rhythms of a consistent and reliable space in nature. Ultimately, the goal of the collection is to promote awareness of the value of women and queer folk, of natural settings, and of good mental healthcare, and how these spheres go hand-in-hand. This message of hope is created with the rhythms of punk outsider music, Latinx culture, and irreverent humor.
About the Author :
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY)-Bronx Community College, and an appointed professor in the CUNY Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Program at The Graduate Center. Their poetry collection, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, was a 2020 finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (Get Fresh Books, 2021). She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), which was listed in NBC Latino's Hispanic Heritage Month recommendations. Dr. Acosta has been a Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal, and a Poetry Editor at Women's Studies Quarterly (WSQ). Select work is in American Studies Journal; Women's Media Center; Poetry Magazine; Poem-A-Day; The Baffler; Acentos Review; Inkwell Journal; and The Hopkins Review. They are the recipient of a 2025 New Jersey State Council on theArts/Mid-Atlantic Arts Fellowship Grant. Additionally, they have received grants from the Sundress Academy for the Arts residency, and Arts, Letters, Numbers residency. Dr. Acosta's work on oral history interviews of the Latino population in Logan Squarehas recently been housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Digital Archives; this is an ongoing project. Dr. Acosta is a native Chicagoan with familial roots in Cuba and Colombia. Her intersectional work draws from Latino culture, and varioussubcultures.
Review :
Part battle cry and part love song, Grisel Y. Acosta's Wild declares in every line, "I was born free and I am free." Wild tells us the story of a defiant punk heart that
never gave up, never got bitter, never surrendered to academia or the trials of life in America. "my activist tongue is not tamed/how is it that I am still alive?" Acosta asks and demonstrates to us what it means to be a defiant intellect pursuing both justice and joy for and in the world.
-ire'ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate
Dr. Grisel Acosta's second collection of poetry is an ode to bad-ass women everywhere. Fearless, genre-bending, and brilliant, Wild moves through body, memory, land, and inheritance with ferocity and grace. Drawing from Afro-Latinx, Caribbean, and diasporic histories, Acosta braids personal narrative with cultural critique, ecological witnessing, and formal innovation to ask what it means to survive and thrive in a world determined to tame unruly women, minds, and landscapes. Across three sections-Wild Women, Wild Life, and Wild Mind-these poems confront misogyny, colonial violence, environmental collapse, family challenges, mental health, and desire, while celebrating queerness, aging, pleasure, ancestry, and communal care. The collection is incendiary and tender, intellectual and embodied, rooted in punk defiance and ancestral wisdom. At once intimate and expansive, Wild insists that rage can be holy, softness can be radical, and survival itself can be an act of beauty. This is a book for readers who believe poetry tells the truth, breaks the rules, and leaves teeth marks.
-Marina Carreira, author of Dead Things and Where to Put Them
The women featured in Wild are the opposite of tame-they drink, smoke everything, fornicate, cut off penises, chew on Bic pen caps and more! But mostly they're are obsessed with trying to do the very thing women are taught not to do-live out loud. This book is a rollicking ride through language and received forms that will
possess you. Whether you're reading a Golden Shovel, Contrapuntal, Haibun, or Abecedarian, Acosta's message is the same-girl, make your own damn magic. Acosta has the passion for the political like poet Pat Mora, and her work will forever conjure the polyglot, Gloria Anzaldúa. In a time where the world looks dark for women of color, Wild is the resistant beacon we so need.
-Celeste Doaks, author of Cornrows and Cornfields, American Herstory, and editor of Not Without Our Laughter
This unforgettable collection explores the wildness of life in all its complex dimensions. We witness how wildness shapes gender, health, relationships, animals,
the environment, and our own minds. Moreover, the poems are wild in their diverse forms, rhythms, and intertextual references. I am grateful to Grisel Y. Acosta for
teaching us how to read poetry and experiences as wildly as possible.
-Craig Santos Perez, author of Call This Mutiny: [uncollected poems] and From Unincorporated Territory [åmot], winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry
Grisel Y. Acosta's Wild is archival as well as individual in its reach- a generous gathering of poems snaking in and out and across overlapping fields in a Venn
diagram of experience. To read these poems is to encounter the history of generations of women "who ran things and taught [us] joy" despite seasons of invented phobias and hysterics. They've learned that wildness is elemental, a life force going back to the time we were "a protoplanet that had no word for ownership." Wildness is what hones us to survival and song. It is the generative well from which Acosta draws her own wisdom and performs the magic spells of her poems, so we come away both nourished and fiercely inspired.
-Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of Virginia and author of Caulbearer
