Wayward Creatures: Poems

Author: Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

Publisher: Host Publications (2025)

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.”