Ampersand Organ

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a writer, artist, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Ephemeral, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, and Wayward Creatures. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal; and editor/curator of the Anomalous Press column, Wild-Wired: Neuroqueer and Neurodivergent Poetics. A VONA Alum and recipient of the 2023 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 nonfiction have been published in American Poetry Review, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places. They live in unceded Acjachemen and Tongva lands, otherwise known as southern California.

“Rhodes reflects on the mind, the body, the ecosystems around us, and the intimacy of day-to-day life, connecting them all through the ampersand…”—Alta Magazine "Here is a tenderness of erotic noncompliance. Oracle oracle oracle. Enter into Ampersand Organ and you will sway in the hungry hum of this collection. Invitations abound: Let’s tango slant, let’s trip through missives of fleshly futurist dreams, where the 'interthalamic is intergalactic.' A pain brain is dancing with the bees and the deepwater anglerfish. You can add and enfold and footnote and trip in neurodiverse fireworks abundance—but know that some joints of these addenda open up into permeability, immune adventures, new inventions, contaminations of flavors. How can we live in an open geometry? Step through this book’s enticing door."—Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma"This is IRREPRESSIBLE, VORACIOUS, ASTOUNDING study. Can you feel me in the color? I am screaming and giving thanks for what this breaks. This urgent, embodied theory alive by our very entanglements, our flights into numerous sounds and shapes. And here, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is convening us into something radical and fierce. Citation as breath. Love, the erotic, blur as 'political-philosophical orientation.' With them I make an errant path, remembering the world, as I do here, in its real and gorgeous prisms exceeding the logics of conformance and the liberal state. Touched, I am so touched into life by these 'abundant divergences in thinking-feeling & bodying forth.'”—aracelis girmay, author of GREEN OF ALL HEADS"Gliding between poetry as theory and theory as poetry, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes gracefully drops the reader amid an ensemble of bodies within bodies to breathe with and within fellowship’s vibrations. Throughout this beautiful text, relation radiates via citation whereby the tiny ampersand is social oxygen and communal pulse, heart string and entangled tug."—Sandra Ruiz, author of Tears for Tears"Ampersand Organ presents a replete and word-besotted pharmacopeia: vibrant, reaching, mycorrhizal as stars. At once a literary compendium, an astrological herbarium, a door-full of nervy graffiti and a hyperglossic grimoire, this book is a valiant resource and a case for care-contra-harm."—Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral and Death Styles