In Ampersand Organ (Milkweed Editions), heidi andrea restrepo rhodes' voice feels like an intelligent universe speaking directly to the reader in an arc of animals, plants, minerals, textures, black matter and spooky action. They write with the wisdom, lexicon, and understanding in which one experiences deep geological time, tender presence, and vast futures. It's hard to hold any one image too long as rhodes transitions from one to the next, in an incantation of verse that unfurls in tessellations. This is a journey of consciousness.
I am new to rhodes' work and had no expectations when I turned to page one. Ampersands have a friendly joining spirit in practice (and an elegant tendril of curl in view) and so, I felt welcomed into this book on arrival and then deeply intrigued as it unfolded.
rhodes has the vocabulary and knowledge of the library itself and the way they write, it feels apparent to me that this knowledge is constantly at the tip of their tongue, dancing onto the page as if it was the most natural sequence of connections ever.
At the bottom of each page, footnoted appreciations, quotes, and nods to authors, texts, and passages are an entryway into rhodes' brilliant mind. There's nothing stale here, each footnote like a Post-it of praise you might leave for a friend in appreciation of wisdom.
There's an expansiveness to rhodes writing, vision, and experience of the world that feels deeply comforting, even as they explore difficult states of being—discomfort with the world, the brutal realities of patriarchy, white-supremacy, and fascism that surround us—there's also the profound joy of sensation, the experience of color, the lives of oysters, octopus, and porcupine. The way one body blurs into the next put me at ease as I read Ampersand Organ. If it were a religion, I am inside worshiping.
This is an important, essential book for our times, and I sincerely hope you pick up a copy to experience it for yourself.
Welcome to The Poetry Shop 5, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes! We always start out by asking… who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem got you interested in poetry?
I was a Shel Silverstein kid in the 90s, and very much modeled my first poems at the age of nine off his work. The pleasure of rhyme and silliness delighted me. As a teenager, Pablo Neruda and Arthur Rimbaud were the first adult poets I dove into.
Neruda's musicality and Rimbaud's queerness drew me in. Both of their radical, anti-totalitarianisms were what made me stay with them. From them I learned how language can quicken the blood and defy power, destroy and create entire worlds.
Which poetry book are you currently reading?
The last few months I have been jumping between Imogen Smith's Stemmy Things (Nightboat Books), Jane Shi's Echolalia Echolalia (Brick Books), and Latif Askia Ba's The Choreic Period(Milkweed Editions).
Imogen Smith's Stemmy Things feels kindred to me in its risk of being "difficult", its play with abstraction woven with the materiality of trans and neuroqueer existence and erotics. Jane Shi's Echolalia Echolalia has been incredibly generative to my thinking and writing about autistic poetics and worlding, and her snark has kept me laughing at the absurdity of ableism's disqualification of autistic thought. Latif Askia Ba's The Choreic Period is beautifully generous in a way I feel in my body, while it also refuses liberal accommodation as the crux of disability justice.
Is there a book on the craft of writing that you recommend to poets?
I've never really read a book on craft. I didn't come from an MFA, and my approach to studying the how-tos has always been to just read and read and read the work of others, to take workshops and have conversations with others. Overtime, all of those practices have shaped how I see poetry and how I experiment with the writing of it. I learn by doing, by being in community, by witnessing what stuns or or moves me and building a toolbox from observation and attempts both "failed" and "succeeding."
Who is a new voice in poetry that we need to check out–someone with a debut book or recent release?
Mick Powell has been absolutely wowing me on stage and on the page these past couple of years, and their debut collection, Dead Girl Cameo (One World) came out in 2025. anna nygren's debut collection, blush/river/fox (Milkweed Editions) is so strange and wonderful and unexpected, like meandering through an iridescent neuroqueer dreamspace on the other side of which, with every rereading, I find myself changed. .
Finally, what’s a poetry book that others may not know about but deserves a shout out?
Bryan Byrdlong's Strange Flowers (YesYes Books)! ALOCASIA: 99 queer writers on plants and nature! Tala Khanmalek's An Infinity of Traces (Blue Cactus Press, forthcoming 2026)! The Versus Versus: 100 Poems by deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent poets (Bloodaxe Books).
About heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and the forthcoming Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. Their poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in American Poetry Review, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places. They live in Tongva lands otherwise known as southern California.
Books & poets referenced in this article.
Ampersand Organ (Milkweed Editions) by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
Books of Shel Silverstein & Pablo Neruda & Arthur Rimbaud
Stemmy Things (Nightboat Books) by Imogen Smith
Echolalia Echolalia (Brick Books) by Jane Shi
The Choreic Period (Milkweed Editions) by Latif Askia Ba
Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Song in Poems (One World) by m. mick powell
blush/river/fox (Milkweed Editions) anna nygren
Strange Flowers (YesYes Books) Bryan Byrdlong
ALOCASIA: 99 queer writers on plants and nature
An Infinity of Traces (Blue Cactus Press) by Tala Khanmalek (forthcoming in 2026)
Versus Versus: 100 Poems by deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent poets (Bloodaxe Books) edited by Rachael Boast