The Inheritance of Haunting - Softcover

Restrepo Rhodes, Heidi Andrea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268105383 ISBN 13: 9780268105389

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019

Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.

The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life―a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin.

These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.

About this title

About the Author

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a queer, disabled, brown/Colombian poet, scholar, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting explores intergenerational memory and postcolonial trauma. Most recently, she was a spring 2021 Mellon Arts Fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Her work has been published in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Nat. Brut, Foglifter, and Waxwing, among other places.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

if I wear my hair this way

mija, if I wear my hair / wrapped in a bun this way / like a cyclops full moon / or the tidy nest of a colibrí / it means the day was long in grave caverns / it means I spent the hours eating mud / scouring the under-earth for light & glimmer / it means my blistered feet will ache by the fire & I will have no words for you tonight /

pero mija, if you see my hair let loose / suelto, unleashed / like a crown of wild spiral crows / or a fishing net full of flying sable salmon / it means the hours passed while I panned in the shallow edges of a cool spring / gazing into the batea / it means your smile came to me / a glistening sun in the silver sifting plate / it means tonight I will knit my arms around you / I will open my ears to your monsoon of questions / I will sing you the holy songs of trees /

(excerpted from part 1)

dis-astre

these events, ourselves

asunder, exiled from our stars,

our guides, sightless night

shorn by our every

miniscule apocalypse, atoms

like planets breaking, misfortunes

tethering regret, the failure of inoculations,

the collapse of disbelief, shredded altitudes

fretting our sense of upward, out

the plundered remembrance

that home was a star that glittered

in shining sounds of fiddlers rustling,

that day was a star, & mother, & prayer,

& every god who fed us

the bursting forth of seedlings under rain,

& also tomorrow, stars, all,

luminescing constellation, out of reach

from beneath the sprouting grasses,

from under earth, from the never-breath lung

until midnight dogs

dirty their jaws, & like howling

feral midwives, endure the hours

heaving the gravel of torments in the

delivery of bones, the birthing of claims,

the gift of illumination

impossible in the stench of withered sockets

under the light of ancient suns

their yet

unannounced & holy extinguishing.

(excerpted from part 2)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268105383
• ISBN 13: 9780268105389
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108