Wild Like a Woman
Thalia Geiger is a poetry editor and author of the chapbook Wild Like a Woman (Finishing Line Press, 2025). She is the winner of Black Fox Literary’s 2025 Summer Fox Tales Contest, and her work has been featured in New York Quarterly, Allegory Ridge, Coffin Bell, Grim & Gilded and more. She hails from Philadelphia, where she works in journal publishing. You can find her on Instagram and BlueSky @thalierr.
Wild Like a Woman
a poetry chapbook
from Finishing Line Press
Thalia Geiger’s Wild Like a Woman is an extensive meditation on femininity, born as a reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Cycling through emotional places both high and low, Wild Like a Woman moves from loss and lamentation to rage and defiance, then back again to the subsequent focus on the celebration of womanhood, girlhood, and every little joy in between.
Early Reviews
Come revel in the femme splendor of this tantalizing collection with me – I can’t tell you how to work the witchcraft of being fully present in the natural world any better than these poems do. Thalia Geiger’s Wild Like a Woman is a complex blossoming and yet also fully bloomed. She embodies “The whole river, and everything that lives inside it.” She embraces the shapeshifting energy of the cicada, the microbiome, the invasive ivy. “I hear it singing in the dark,” Geiger writes of the dark feminine spirit, and I believe her.
Thalia Geiger’s new collection is a lesson in scale, simultaneously intimately human and humble while taking in all of the universe. Its exploration of womanhood in a post-roe world shrinks down to the size of a single lost birth control pill and gut biomes, only to explode out into a critique of poetry itself. It starts and ends exposed to the world; unsure but ready; fiercely proud of its container even as it explores its raw edges. Like Louise Glück, Ana Codjoe and other poets it proudly takes its inspiration from, Wild Like a Woman is a sharp, naturalistic and full exploration of modern femininity that anyone can find inspiration in.
Soft Against
the Stone
She is sitting on a rock like some goddess,
foot curled up in comfortability.
Her softness against the stone like gray
morning light against deep, red earth.
She doesn’t wonder. What’s right
in front of her tells her everything
she needs to know. Her brow is cool,
relaxed. Eyes trained ahead and only
ahead at the world. She is steady
and sure, just as the mountains
know substantial winds but withstand
them. Just as the crocuses in this white
spring open their mouths at every
afternoon’s warmth like clockwork,
knowing what they know.
From Wild Like a Woman