Wayward Creatures by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

With monstrous joy and tenderness untamed, Wayward Creatures is a collection that spills with the verdant language of excess, inviting us to step into its wild grasses. Here, the colonizer’s language has been overgrown by an ecology of strangeness and possibility—poetry disrupts, rituals, and revolts, rendering queer abolition irresistible.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers poems as portals into a “wilderness of intimacies” where the crip marvelous, the sacred profane, and trans love emerge in an ecstatic throng. With a poetics that resists taxonomy, many voices surge through this collection. They speak us new names, and urge us toward vibrant becomings.

This is deeply necessary, restorative work—kinning marigolds, cicadas, fungi, universes—Wayward Creatures dismantles the myth of separateness, inviting us to allow ourselves to be nourished by this living entanglement, ignited by mutual spark. From the burning map of this lexicon, may we learn “lessons / of fire,” how to “tend a basic flame / & char down the plantation.”

With an introduction by award-winning poet and scholar Meg Day.

Wayward Creatures is a vivid, sensuous chorus of grief and becoming. heidi andrea restrepo rhodes invites us to abandon the tidy myth of coherence and enter a proliferating language—fungal, tender, feral with pain and joy. These are poems of sacred monstrosity and “too much infinity,” where selves refuse erasure and emerge in exquisite multiplicity, unspooled across timelines and pleasure fields. A galaxy of kinships swells through these pages, whispering, howling, “what exceeds the catalogue of Discovery.” These poems do not flinch from obliteration, chronic illness, or state violence—but they do not end there. They wander, sensate and ungovernable, through ecological time and trans love, opening portals. This is a body book, a spell of plural pronouns and uncertain moons. “I remain / uncontained.” May we all. —Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Consider the Rooster

For those who seek out poetry to portal to a universe in which colonial laws and borders define neither the contours nor the intimate interiors of our queer, sick, and disabled bodies, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s Wayward Creatures is that open door to our otherwhere. Unruly and teeming with fungal splendor, these poems howl at us “monster up” as we step into a future of unknowns, dragging all of our gorgeously terrible with us and our unbound devotion to each other. — Muriel Leung, author of How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes(they/them) 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 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), Ephemeral (EcoTheo Collective, 2024), Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2025), Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric anatomy (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in 2026). Their art, photography, and writing, have been in a number of community art shows including at the National Queer Arts Festival and Rosebud Gallery in San Francisco, the BGSQD in New York City, and exhibitions across Canada, the United States, and Belgium. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. A VONA Alum, and 2023 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, they have received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar Productions, and Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Their poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry among other places. They live in southern California. IG: @vessels.we.are