"making the creaturely visible in raw form": A Review of Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes | $20 | 160 pages | ISBN: 978-1-7376050-8-9 |

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heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’ tender and fiery poetry collection Wayward Creatures (re)claims the monstrous and the nonhuman as metaphor and physical embodiment of BIPOC, queer, trans, and disabled people’s lived experience. Their poems forge an insurgent space, confronting ongoing colonial and capitalist realities with queer affection, attention, and tenacity. 

Amongst its found prayers, transformations, life cycles, anti-essays, and songs, rhodes queers poems, conjuring a swaying current through which we assume the form of many beings– lovers, birds, cicadas, willows, seeds. 

The collection’s poetics insist on making the creaturely visible in raw form. Rather than seeking legibility, they take up the monstrous forms BIPOC, queer, trans and disabled people are assigned and wield them in the face of the state as an exuberant force of defiance towards liberation. Several poems including the opening “Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis”, “To the disorientation among the faithful”, the “Found prayer” series and “American ugly” incorporate or respond directly to transphobic, homophobic and ableist legislation across US history and our present moment. “American ugly” dialogues with an old Chicago City Code which punished any person visible in public who was “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” In reply, the speaker invokes their disruptive power from these names: 

Call me a street obstruction, call me a pile of bricks

a stress occurrence,     a pilgrimage of brides disqualified

perfect wrecks, wretches of animal proportion

Sad sight, we miserable objects, raw material, spatial dissidents.

The speaker claims not only themselves, but a communal “we” as an unsettling force of nature against the policy, “voic[ing]” their monstrous glory in public view, pridefully bearing their “accumulation of spectacles.” I delight in the frequency of such moments across the collection in which rhodes seems to both grieve and relish in the liminal space their communities have been pushed to. Existing within this space is to be a target of state violence and yet to be powerful “spatial dissidents,” living in “raw material” possibility, at home with community and our own creaturely bodies and forms. “American ugly” continually invites the reader– both in assuming monstrosity proudly, and witnessing and coinhabiting their suffering– to embrace their “perfect wreck”: 

If I am curled up in pain, a collapsed anatomy, 

my blood a congregation of fatigues, 

bear it with me.

Each joy and sorrow of this collection points us back towards each other– where do we reach out to hold our communities and where can we hold more? Whether togetherness is being alongside in strife, in direct action, intimacy, or friendship, rhodes’ poems call for attunement and acts of communal care to make up for the failure of colonial and capitalist systems. Wayward Creatures embodies the collective by frequently drawing from and invoking historical and contemporary poets, thinkers, and rhodes’ loved ones, an orbit of human and nonhuman beings. For me the richness comes from rhodes’ range of influence, from Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman exhibited in freak shows in the 19th century to poets Harryette Mullen, Fred Moten, and numerous songs, films, myths and organizations cited in their acknowledgments. Historical, theoretical, and political grounding is bound up with the personal, bringing a diverse constellation of community into central focus in Wayward Creatures. 

Tenderness abounds in these kinships, which are on full display in "I feel the feels of gladness they do, the willows, feel”, a poem after and for Opal Whiteley, whose childhood nature diaries have been read widely. Here the human speaker’s awe is fully present with nature’s language of gesture:

“I did have knowing all my animal friends would be glad for the remembers:

when the brown leaves flutter, they are saying little things about

the silk bags of spiders,       the light in our eyes while having kisses for each other.

The wind tosses back my curls to whisper little whispers of moths-to-be:

I do listen; I do feel its feels.

The curious speaker is filled with knowledge of the necessity for attunement to nonhuman life through statements like “I did have knowing…” perhaps referring to a connection to nature in childhood, and persistent attention– “I do listen; I do feel its feels.” They are listening, not just to their surroundings, but to what their “animal friends” are saying about the beings they live among. The poem seeks to know how nature speaks of themselves. Though the leaves are “saying little things,”and the wind is whispering “little whispers,” the small language of their aliveness is not treated as trivial. The devotional pages this poem spans assure us their voices are sacred. Here, rhodes leans our ears closer to the soil, to the hushed voices, the trees winking to each other on the side of the highway, at the edge of our noticing.

Whether in joyful lyrical or pointed critique, rhodes persistently casts off hegemonic structures of sexuality, gender, and taxonomy. Across the collection, liberation is present and possible in the infectious moments of relinquishing the laws of society and nature in favor of becoming only “a living thing / of anomalous shape.” In “Per the pleasures of monstrosity”, rhodes brings us further into the embrace of “American ugly” and into conversation with Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” where she claims the power of the monstrous in trans bodies and rage. As in other poems, rhodes carries queer theory and trans history with them, reverberating Stryker’s embrace of boundless unabashed being:

In another era, our would-be ash is thrown     to the wind, but we solicit no one

to mold us into human   form. Our labyrinthine bodies         breach

everything         that separates. Treasury of errant     cosmologies.

Remember how ecstatic I was       in the rain, beyond the reach         of the civilized?

In Wayward Creatures, rhodes teaches us how to remember, how to open ourselves to “the pleasure of creaturing in this matrix of possibilities”. Their poems brilliantly shapeshift form and beings, accumulating the splendor of multiplicity, and the urgency towards liberation for all beings. While anti-trans legislation and violence continue to rise, rhodes’ words open a needed space for folks to commune and become freer Wayward Creatures. Their words allow readers to step into the brazen and euphoric “matrix of possibilities” they have sown. 

Wayward Creatures is a writhing beauty, the maggots dancing giddy in the compost, glistening under sun, turning words into their own fertile soil.

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Fiona Martinez is a queer poet from Boise, Idaho and an MFA writing student at UC San Diego. Her hybrid work embodies the natural world (water, limbs, birds & ants) to queer the border between human and nonhuman beings, experiences of mixed identity, and the entanglement of violence and tenderness in our shared work towards liberation. Fiona’s work can be found in the Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology, Alchemy Journal of Translation, Voicemail Poems, and Stonecoast Review.