When I first sat down to write about heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s fifth poetry collection Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric, I didn’t know where to begin — not because this collection fails to give its readers an entry point into the text, but because Ampersand Organ is bursting with entrances and ecstatic invitations. “The elder’s voice, vesseled rugose cheeks, resounding ancestral dispatch in my ear: everything is an opening. EVERYTHING is an opening,” rhodes writes, offering a seductive call to readers to shed the formal containers of language and hegemonic human embodiment and instead surrender to the glorious cacophony of aliveness evoked by an exuberant poetic voice.
Ampersand Organ is unconcerned with the boundaries between poetry and prose or between the self and the world. Its scope is expansive, weaving together explorations of personal, political, and ecological grief; interconnectedness and interdependence; neurodivergence, disability, and Madness; love and care in myriad forms. In the hands of a less skillful poet, a collection so broad might read as disjointed or unfocused, but this is how rhodes’s speaker experiences the world — as a vast, nonlinear web of relatedness wherein the spirit coursing through their body is the same spirit animating serpents, marigolds, the land, ghosts, and language itself: “& everything touches everything.”
Depending how you choose to read it, Ampersand Organ consists of either one long lyric prose poem or dozens of individual, untitled prose poems, nearly all of which begin in media res with the titular ampersand. “& isn’t the heart / an ampersand,” asks aracelis girmay in the first of the collection’s three epigraphs, and rhodes takes this idea to its furthest conclusion. More than a mere punctuated shorthand for the conjunction “and,” rhodes’s ampersand is the heart pulsing throughout this collection, moving it forward through associative leaps and unexpected voltas. The ampersand is connection, is ongoingness, is anaphora, is stimming, is contradiction, is maximalism, is everything: “& the universe is an & the universe is an & the universe is an & the universe is an & the universe” repeats over and over across one page, orbiting around a smaller block of text that reads “&myheart&/myheartmyheart/&youmyheart&/we.”
rhodes renders language gorgeously strange, critiquing the hegemony of the written word, reveling in stims, and echolalia, and other forms of autistic joy that are too often dismissed as childish or wrong.
The ampersand also functions as a type of footnote, appearing throughout the book as rhodes cites ideas, phrases, texts, films, conversations, and friendships. This generous, rigorous practice of citation builds off of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s concept of “echotextia,” defined in their essay “Autistic Long-Form, Short-Form, No-Form, Echotextia: Autistic Poetic Forms” as “a specifically autistic poetic form that breaks from the white/Western/allistic poetic norm of individualism, where a poem exists in a vacuum of Individual Unique Thoughts that Have Nothing to Do with Other Poems.”
Rather than relying on the clichéd myth of the lone, tortured genius writer toiling in solitude and waiting for the muse to strike, rhodes embraces the constellation of friends, mentors, influences, and literary ancestors who have shaped their ideas and poetics. In Ampersand Organ, citation is not a formality or an academic practice; it is a celebration, an expression of devotion, an offering. These footnotes are not just book titles and page numbers either (although those can be found in the extensive and meticulous Notes section) — they are poems in and of themselves: “Anaïs Nin, you who also raised me, you whose ghost I’ve lingered with in the café on East Thirteenth Street, you who still whisper in my ear.”
One of the most compelling aspects of Ampersand Organ is its neuroqueer poetics: that is, its explicitly and joyously autistic approach to language. Even as this collection plumbs the depths of overwhelming grief and rage, there is a sense of freedom and play in its linguistic and syntactical wildness:
What is the song nonspeaking sings in the body & its beyonds? What is heard as word or
absence thereof, utterance & un-, vocal stims & repetitions, stutterance & hum is always
a coral choral meandering of togethernesses: Greens & whooshing sounds. High-pitched
shiny yellow up up zip zip. Beautiful big big. Heart whorling paper airplane through
every other ampersand organ in the room.
rhodes renders language gorgeously strange, critiquing the hegemony of the written word, reveling in stims, and echolalia, and other forms of autistic joy that are too often dismissed as childish or wrong. Reading this collection gave me a permission I didn’t know I needed to unmask my poetic voice and subvert neurotypical expectations and constraints of language, to be weirder and wilder with words.
As its ideas circle and coalesce, Ampersand Organ reminds us how urgently we must embody interdependence in the face of fascism, genocide, climate catastrophe, systemic oppression, and the many other concurrent crises that define this era. Connection — and the practice of recognizing ourselves in every being — is not just an antidote to loneliness; it is the most powerful tool of resistance available to us.
“of us & those we love, make it possible to forget we are islands, or strangers across an abyss, absolute & infinite otherness” is rhodes’s invocation to their readers and beloveds. “Oh my friends, my soul my soul, my delicate, fervent bond, your beautiful beautiful divine & beautiful bodies.”