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A fearless, expansive collection that blurs the boundary between body and poem, wielding a liberatory lyric impulse that revels from neuron to nebula and back.
Here is a book of many hearts, a revolutionary tide pool, a mycelial space and sensorium where our neural pathways are “always shared, collective, and entangled.” In this “more-than-human lyric,” heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers the ampersand, a mode of encounter that unfixes the reader. This form—a lyric prose poem beginning, midsentence, with an ampersand—accesses the intimacies of a life shaped by perpetual “and-ing.” These ampersands move by associative leap, synesthetic braid, and inter-species blur to revel in everything that makes us more than singular subjects.
Neuroqueering poetics, rhodes writes toward deft and loving excess: spillage, echolalia, stutter, loop, and non-linear detour, refiguring what the lyric can be and what the body can do. These poems revolt against all forms of supremacy, inviting us into unexpected kinship with animal, mineral, vegetal, and heavenly bodies, each replete with its own languages, temporalities, histories, and worlds.
Tending an everyday eroticism with its “heart at the sleeve, in the palm,” Ampersand Organ is unafraid to feel, to feel again, to feel feeling wherever it’s wildly felt. Here is a radiant, divergent, emergent field guide for how we might all shiver and shimmer into the and and and . . .
"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