Inheritance of Haunting

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.

"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"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"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"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 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

• ForewordPart 1. El Otro Lado / The Other Side1. the past is a candle in the temple of my mouth2. the other side (I.)3. scar4. all your braids like a compass will bring us home5. all that is left6. where it begins7. tristeza profunda8. heard in the yes of gods9. she who does not feel her name beneath her feet will wander, will wander10. if I wear my hair this way11. imbunche12. 190113. blood of la mojana14. the flower husband15. purgatory16. la llorona17. the dream in which we die together18. heresy in our bones19. missionary20. prayer for the children who will be born with today's daggers in their tomorrow eyes21. the other side (II.)Part 2. Casi Pájaros / Almost Birds1. dis-astre2. when the machete will sever the ballad (memory-mourning for El Mozote)3. fog4. last balloon5. eternal return6. so far7. the terror of clean8. A117289. non-combat related incidents & other lies10. elix/womb/house11. what the bird has seen12. like fish like song13. little birds14. onomasticon (I.) (or, I sing the names of our dead)15. the ache on the tongue of the grieving16. the value of sparrows17. azan, or the call to prayer, o resistir es rezar que arrasamos el orden de arrancamiento, or when the sky opens & I am swallowed18. 'til the taste of free in our mouths (brown baby lullaby)19. for the boy who went to war & came back fire, came back song20. fishboneEndnotesGratitude