Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

THE INHERITANCE OF HAUNTING University of Notre Dame Press (Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize)

these five hundred years in our bones striated conquistas dragging the letters of the harrowed tongue into the geography of our marrow, down

—from “prayer for the children who will be born with today’s daggers in their tomorrow eyes”

HOW IT BEGAN: This book emerged as a result of poetry as a mode of survival and healing at the intersections of my own autoimmune illness and excavations into historical memory, generational trauma, and collective responsibility. I was undertaking familial genealogical research, as well as human rights research in militarized regions, while contending with illness that left me bedbound. Across the work, to be haunted is to live in an ongoing encounter with what will not let us rest, with what we face in the ongoing repetitions of violence in the afterlives of conquest, capital, coloniality. It felt necessary to write through some of the threads that intertwine our bodies with the world, with the political, with historical grief—to respond to the ghost as both the obstinate echo,

as well as a willful, living fury calling us into question.

INSPIRATION: Family stories and ephemera passed down, prophetic dreams and how we carry our dead, colonial archives, histories of science, cultural mythologies and childhood legends, art and music and photography, monster studies, human rights reports and newspaper headlines, testimonies from survivors of state violence and authoritarian regimes.

WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I take walks or go to museums or read work by others—activities that draw me outward to listen and be in relation to the world around me, whether that be the sensory delight of pausing for a trail of flowers, or taking in new ideas through an art exhibition.

ADVICE: Writing an abstract that articulates what the collection is about can help to communicate your work to editors while allowing you to create a map for what else your manuscript is asking to become.

AGE: 38. RESIDENCE:

Brooklyn, New York.

JOB: I am finishing up my PhD in political theory. TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK:

Three years. TIME SPENT FINDING A

HOME FOR IT: Raspa, a queer Latinx journal and press founded by César Ramos, had invited me to publish a chapbook version of the book in 2014, but a whole confluence of things for which no one was to blame kept that from happening. I continued to build the manuscript, which came together in its current form at the end of 2017, and submitted it to the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. It was my sister, Chelsea, who dropped it at the post office, as I was too sick to leave my apartment the week of the deadline.