The Inheritance of Haunting

by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268105389
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	03/30/2019
Series:	Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
Pages:	108
Sales rank:	1,129,195
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

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)

Table of Contents

Foreword

Part 1. El Otro Lado / The Other Side

1. the past is a candle in the temple of my mouth

2. the other side (I.)

3. scar

4. all your braids like a compass will bring us home

5. all that is left

6. where it begins

7. tristeza profunda

8. heard in the yes of gods

9. she who does not feel her name beneath her feet will wander, will wander

10. if I wear my hair this way

11. imbunche

12. 1901

13. blood of la mojana

14. the flower husband

15. purgatory

16. la llorona

17. the dream in which we die together

18. heresy in our bones

19. missionary

20. prayer for the children who will be born with today’s daggers in their tomorrow eyes

21. the other side (II.)

Part 2. Casi Pájaros / Almost Birds

1. dis-astre

2. when the machete will sever the ballad (memory-mourning for El Mozote)

3. fog

4. last balloon

5. eternal return

6. so far

7. the terror of clean

8. A11728

9. non-combat related incidents & other lies

10. elix/womb/house

11. what the bird has seen

12. like fish like song

13. little birds

14. onomasticon (I.) (or, I sing the names of our dead)

15. the ache on the tongue of the grieving

16. the value of sparrows

17. azan, or the call to prayer, o resistir es rezar que arrasamos el orden de arrancamiento, or when the sky opens & I am swallowed

18. ‘til the taste of free in our mouths (brown baby lullaby)

19. for the boy who went to war & came back fire, came back song

20. fishbone

Endnotes

Gratitude

Editorial Reviews

"This book—historical, mystical, fiercely alive—is a book of laments that are also geographies, words that are also figures, perforations, marks ferrying the dead, the dead who have taught this poet how to read the air, the scar, the hair. Traces of the lost in what is not lost. And (this is the thing!) the poems themselves are signals and routes. A song repeats, reminds us of our Befores as they worked toward getting free, getting us free. These poems are a part of that same long song. Spell, testimony, strategy, prayer. They flood me with courage and attention. From somewhere under the paper comes a sound: 'this is how you read. / this is how we arm you in the language. . . '"

Aracelis Girmay

A brutal, but necessary, unveiling of violence and the ghosts we carry with us daily, The Inheritance of Haunting sings the unbearable and still makes a claim for survival. These are intricate poems that are odes to the women who have come before us, odes to the women who have been silenced by fear, and odes to the ‘wreckage of centuries.’ With language that is alive, inventive, sound-driven, and ricocheting with power, this is a fierce and breathtaking collection that risks calling for a great reckoning with our collective past.

Ada Limón

"The Inheritance of Haunting honors the legacies of our dead, traces a connective tissue across suffering from the Andes to Palestine. But instead of only noticing suffering, this book is a canto 'with roots too deep to measure.' Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes's first collection is a spell that disintegrates carnivorous colonizers and locates 'the go back to where you came from when there is nowhere but here.' Rhodes transforms history into a reminder about 'how hard we fought for here, this simple morning.' Behold: 'the holy songs of trees.'"

Vickie Vértiz

"This collection is a rumination on the memories, the violence and the acts of liberation that live in the body across generations of colonization, war, and upheaval. . . . Representing the voices of individual and collective ghosts from across Latin America, this collection asks us to account for the past and to celebrate the lives that come after."

Electric Lit

"This book—historical, mystical, fiercely alive—is a book of laments that are also geographies, words that are also figures, perforations, marks ferrying the dead, the dead who have taught this poet how to read the air, the scar, the hair. Traces of the lost in what is not lost. And (this is the thing!) the poems themselves are signals and routes. A song repeats, reminds us of our Befores as they worked toward getting free, getting us free. These poems are a part of that same long song. Spell, testimony, strategy, prayer. They flood me with courage and attention. From somewhere under the paper comes a sound: 'this is how you read. / this is how we arm you in the language. . . '" —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

"The Inheritance of Haunting honors the legacies of our dead, traces a connective tissue across suffering from the Andes to Palestine. But instead of only noticing suffering, this book is a canto 'with roots too deep to measure.' Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes's first collection is a spell that disintegrates carnivorous colonizers and locates 'the go back to where you came from when there is nowhere but here.' Rhodes transforms history into a reminder about 'how hard we fought for here, this simple morning.' Behold: 'the holy songs of trees.'" —Vickie Vértiz, author of Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut

"This collection is a rumination on the memories, the violence and the acts of liberation that live in the body across generations of colonization, war, and upheaval. . . . Representing the voices of individual and collective ghosts from across Latin America, this collection asks us to account for the past and to celebrate the lives that come after." —Electric Lit

"Restrepo Rhodes’s The Inheritance of Haunting stands out, at least to this reader, as an aesthetically potent and ethically rigorous work with unrivaled incantatory powers. . . . [Its] poetics are akin to a cathartically rich espiritismo séance—and, as a caribeño, I don’t use these words lightly." —The Rumpus

“A brutal, but necessary, unveiling of violence and the ghosts we carry with us daily, The Inheritance of Haunting sings the unbearable and still makes a claim for survival. These are intricate poems that are odes to the women who have come before us, odes to the women who have been silenced by fear, and odes to the ‘wreckage of centuries.’ With language that is alive, inventive, sound-driven, and ricocheting with power, this is a fierce and breathtaking collection that risks calling for a great reckoning with our collective past.” — Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things

From the Publisher