territory monsters can't be refreshed Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

territory monsters can't be refreshed Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodesFinalist for the 2026 Williams Carlos Williams Award Shortlisted for Lambda Literary Art's 2026 LGBTQ+ Poetry Lammy Award 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 colonizers language has been overgrown by an ecology of strangeness and possibilitypoetry disrupts, rituals, and revolts, rendering queer abolition

★ Finalist for the 2026 Williams Carlos Williams Award
★ Shortlisted for Lambda Literary Art's 2026 LGBTQ+ Poetry Lammy Award

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

This is a monster of a book, an ecology of being in which all bodies are poems and all poems are bodies. rhodes asks the reader: How does the poem of us begin? Then, proceeds to dismantle the notion of beginning and ending. In Wayward Creatures, time is a branch from which we fruit, die, and bud again. It is the dark unknowable depth of space. It is the constellatory nature of queer love. Tucked into these pages is the book of crip dreams, which is a kind of scripture, and is also the book you are touching now—with your hot and human hands. — Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection

In Wayward Creatures, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes works with language to find such lush and sonic expanses within which we are alive, might live, (might) have lived. Emerging from shapeshifting collectives, these striking, sensuous poems are vibrant with dreaming and embodied political analysis. Coded, incandescent, with so much we in the tongues, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes re-members us into our need. They are at work here on such gorgeous, such powerful paths out of violent structures and toward each other: “In the book of eating clouds with kin, upon the heart of my mutiny, I am here.” — aracelis girmay, author of the black maria

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 is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. Their books include The Inheritance of Haunting, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. 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, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places.

✦ Online Publications ✦

✦ Poetry Foundation, Disability Poetics: Poetry of Liberation, “A small disunified theory”

✦ Poetry Magazine, Letras Latinas 20th anniversary One Poem Festival folio, “Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis”

✦ Boston Review Online,“Blessed are thou amongst”

✦ Georgia Review, “Crip Time-Loop Pantoum”, “Murmuring in the Dark” and “If God is a Virus”;

✦ Tupelo Quarterly: “American Ugly”

160 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7376050-8-9
Short ISBN: 1-7376050-8-2
LCCN: 2025937852
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