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"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"-- Introduction to the Poems by Ada Limón -- I. EL OTRO LADO / THE OTHER SIDE. the past is a candle in the temple of my mouth -- the other side (I) -- scar -- all your braids like a compass will bring us home -- all that is left -- where it begins -- tristeza profunda -- heard in the yes of gods -- she who does not feel her name beneath her feet will wander, will wander -- if I wear my hair this way -- imbunche -- 1901 -- blood of la Mojana -- seven generations/one -- the flower husband -- purgatory -- la Llorona -- The dream in which we die togethermissionary -- the heresy in our bones -- prayer for the children who will be born with today's daggers in their tomorrow eyes -- the other side (II) -- I I . CASI PÁJAROS/ALMOST BIRDS. dis-astre -- when the machete will sever the ballad (memory-mourningfor El Mozote) -- fog -- last balloon -- eternal return -- so far -- the terror of clean -- A11728 -- non-combat related incidents & other lies -- helix/womb/house -- what the bird has seen -- like fish, like song -- little birds -- onomasticon (or, I sing the names of our dead) -- the ache on the tongue of the grieving -- the value of sparrows -- Azan, or the call to prayer, o resistir es rezar que arrasemos el orden de arrancamiento, or when the sky opens & I am swallowedtill the taste of free in our mouths (brown baby lullaby) -- for the boy who went to war & came back fire, came back song -- fishbone -- Notes.
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