Wilding University

From poet and performance artist Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves comes the newest addition to Milkweed’s Multiverse series, a genre-bending un-schooling of a lifelong student healing from the early wounds of oppressive teaching cultures.

Welcome to the “synchro-sentient brain / history of poetry / nightclub study hall.” Wilding University is a book of florapoetic antipedagogy for “moon goons” that “warm wombwild in all worlds.” Utilizing a style of “sick bricolage,” Greaves weaves language, philosophy, and nature into a series of incomplete yet comprehensive worlds where they can wild out together. Here, in the motley squabble of American poetics, is a school that exceeds campus, a collective hippocampus throbbing with wonder at what the plants might demand if we could hear them better.

These poems, these songs, these essays are overlapping and unfolding the question of whether we can kin. This is a book for readers who are looking to be sistered, brothered, and bothered, but rest assured: “I am bothering you on purpose.” It is a book on a mission: “The mission is to be the lushback wilderness … The mission is to embarrass Doubt … The mission is to recreate the canon.” In a moment where “THERE IS NO GOD / BUT WE MAKE DO,” Wilding University extends both an invitation—“UNSHUN”—and an admonition: “Be as kind as you can. We are never not touching.”