Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere

Open to any page in this book and the musicality of Grisel Acosta's language jumps out at you. Her words dance to a multitude of beats, be it hip-hop, hard rock, salsa or rhythm and blues. This book is well packed, literally and figuratively for a journey that will take the reader most everywhere. I know you'll enjoy the ride. Bon Voyage!

 

-Danny Shot, author of Works (CavanKerry Press, 2018); Associate Poetry Editor at Tribes.org

 

In Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, Grisel Y. Acosta uses language like a two-sided coin, constantly hurling it in the air and watching it as it lands: a door - toss the coin - it lands - there is no door - toss the coin - it lands - Pelibre - toss it - it lands - the American Dream. Acosta constantly reminds us what women are expected to give up for small freedoms, for love, how our silence will kill us, "so you better learn to yell and cuss and spit the evil eye."

 

-Yesenia Montilla, author of The Pink Box (Willow Books, 2015) & Muse Found in a Colonized Body (Four Way Books, 2022)

 

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta's poems...are acutely aware of their punk and piercing powers. Such poems shriek fearlessly in black-lipsticked memory, and shine in their freakish dancing where chicas must always be "fighting for the ownership of our lives." In this book, you will find that altars and bodies are inseparable, and you will discover a world where women's lives open and close like pairs of bold, dark eyes. Acosta declares, "My mother was dark, too, but she had no voice. Today, I am her voice."

 

-Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Seeing the Body (Norton, 2020)

 

As soon as you enter Acosta's book, you are in the middle of a ritual, a dispatch from a poet who is on speaking terms with death. There is no travelling light in this orbital Afro-Latinx journey. Acosta time bends with precision and can take us to the exact moment where we understand the strength of our resistance to rote definitions of identity. To be sure, Acosta will make you laugh and cry on this trip while she riffs with Lauryn Hill, becomes a poet of the Americas, and makes you grateful for every waking breath you take.  

 

-Willie Perdomo, The Crazy Bunch (Penguin, 2019)