The Inheritance of Haunting

by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

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.

Genres: Poetry

108 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 2019

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my poetry pet peeves is when a collection is dominated by a single mood or emotion. In poetry that deals with race, this is usually a melodramatic melancholia or an onslaught of rage. Rhodes, however, did an excellent job of varying the tone of her poems, sometimes lamenting the inherited and repercussive effects of colonialism, sometimes striking back with a biting or blunt lyric, sometimes delicate and sometimes fierce. In addition, there were also poems that felt victorious and unstoppable, despite the ghosts of the past. As a whole, the collection really lived up to its title: packed full of history that resonates into the now, a haunting of loss and culture that still has an impact on the present, eerie and proud.

My favorite of the collection was all your braids like a compass will bring us home. The poem describes how hairstyles of black slaves became a source of coded communication, in which the weaving of the braids represented a route to freedom, capable of depicting various dangers or save havens along the way. Rhodes writes, "your hair, daughter, black & ferocious,/ your hair, cunning & defiant,/ your hair, beautiful, whispers in tressy tongues" and "hold still, child, let me weave a song through, & bring the shelter of gods to your feet." I liked this poem for several reasons. Primarily, it told a story that I wasn't familiar with-- this tale of defiance, of escape maps woven through hair. Secondly, despite being one of the more narrative-esque poems in the collection with stanzas numbered like chapters or a how-to guide, Rhodes's lyricism and attention to Latin American geography still shines through. Thirdly, it takes the notion of the historically sexualized slave body and turns it completely on its head, giving this quiet and brave power to the flesh in a subtle and unapologetic way.

While at times the language and themes of the poems grew a little repetitive, overall this was a solid collection of poems that feels like a thousand years of ancestry simmered into Rhodes's perspective.

[Trevann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good read. It was refreshing to read a body of work that pays attention to the structure of the poem and how it relates to the poem itself. There was careful crafting of metaphors and other figurative language. The poems were well developed. At times the poems could be repetitive, however, that ties the point together that Latin American countries have a long history of oppression at the hands of colonialism that has spread into today. Therefore the pain felt then were 'inherited' today and so the repetition of the poems were not a terrible thing, I get it. The poems reminded me of the ones I had read in my Literature classes growing up in the Caribbean. They featured old wives tales, colonialism, pain and the audacious hope that has spanned over centuries. I also liked how much the role of women were featured as they are often forgotten about in history.

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful collection of poems that speak to injustices, tragedies, grief and loss. The prose is strong and the emotion and sorrow run deep. Actions today leave consequences for tomorrow.

[Mary Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn. Heidi has been a pen pal of mine for a minute and her letters send me places I cannot explain. This collection had a similar effect- took me from Kashmir to Colombia, from the past to the future, from a bed where a lover traces a scar along a neck to crumbling walls grazing stone.