Rhodes
Brooklyn poet Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes has published The Inheritance of Haunting, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. The poems in Rhodes's collection contend 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.
The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize is awarded every other year by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame for the first full length volume of poetry by a promising Latinx poet. This volume was selected by judge Ada Limón, author of five books of poetry including The Carrying, a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry winner, and Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award. The Montoya Prize aims to support emerging Latinx poets, and "provides a space for artists who, while part of the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States, are also increasingly diverse in their modes of literary expression." Rhodes and Limón have scheduled a joint reading at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on Thursday, October 17, 2019.
ADVANCE PRAISE for The Inheritance of Haunting
"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
BOOK TOUR
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes will be reading from The Inheritance of Haunting at the following locations:
• KGB Bar Red Room, March 24, 2019, 7:00 p.m., NYC
• Book Launch Reading, April 4, 2019, 6:30 p.m., Center for Humanities, James Gallery, NYC
• Book Release Reading, April 19, 2019, Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA
• LibroMobile Reading, April 20, 2019, Santa Ana, CA
• Book Release Reading Party, April 27, 2019, Alley Cat Books, San Francisco, CA
• Book Reading, May 2, 2019, A Room of One's Own Books & Gifts, Madison, WI
• Reading with Ada Limon, October 17, 2019, Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL
Inheritance of Haunting
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes
108 pages
ISBN 978-0-268-10538-9
March 30, 2019 Release
$15 paperback
For more information, or a review copy, contact: Kathryn Pitts at pitts.5@d.edu, 574.631.3267