the
inheritance
of haunting
Available through Powell's books, University of Notre Dame Press, or your favorite independent bookstore.
Release date: March 2019
for the dead who keep close
for these glimmers, futures,
life otherwise, convulsive beauty,
the unruly mess alive, we
rake from the rubble & shadows
“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
"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' 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
Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, is pleased to announce Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes as the winner of the eighth edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, which supports the publication of a first book by a Latinx poet residing in the United States. The winning manuscript was selected by Ada Limón, whose citation reads:
A brutal, but necessary unveiling of violence and 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.
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a queer, disabled, mixed-race, second-generation Colombian immigrant, poet, artist, scholar, and activist. Her creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed in As/Us, Pank, Raspa, Word Riot,Feminist Studies, Huizache, the National Queer Arts Festival, The Sick Collective, the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, SomArts, and Galería de la Raza, among other places. She was a semi-finalist for the 2017 92-Y/Unterburg Poetry Center Discovery Contest, and a semi-finals judge for the 2017 Youth Speaks/Brave New Voices National Poetry Slam Competition. Born in Arizona, and raised in California, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes offered the following statement:
"We are incessantly subject to the ghost as an intrusion of histories of conquest and loss, their vociferations coursing in our mouths. Both liberating and terrifying, haunting is a gift, a mirror to our survival, our defiances, and that of generations before us. It is, too, a responsibility bestowed, for that which haunts us also entrusts us with what we will make of it all, urging us to labor, to conjure ungovernable life against the hold. It moves me, everyday, to be amidst an unyielding riot of poets, Latinx/a/o and otherwise, in this practice of summoning, of writing the world. Receiving the honor of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize is to be called further into this work, with those who dream against the violence and bear witness to the obstinate beauty of life—Montoya’s poetry itself lighting the way."
The Inheritance of Haunting was published in March 2019 with University of Notre Dame Press.
from: https://letraslatinasblog.blogspot.com/2018/04/ada-limon-selects-inheritance-of.html?m=1