Tala Khanmalek interviews heidi andrea restrepo rhodes about their second full-length poetry collection Wayward Creatures (Host Publications, 2025).
“How do I convey, in art and in loving, the blur that is our collective existence and entanglement in a way that interrupts the hold that the semblance of, and loyalty to, the idea of our separability has on us?” This is the central question that, rhodes tells me, they grapple with again and again. As one of their collaborators for almost a decade, I have become increasingly—and intimately—familiar with how “the blur” informs rhodes’ work on the page and, perhaps most importantly, in everyday life.
Indeed, engaging with the blurriness (to echo Fred Moten) of being, both epistemologically and methodologically, is a cornerstone of every book by rhodes, including Wayward Creatures, which was published right between Afterlives of Discovery and the forthcoming Ampersand Organ. In each of these texts as well as their many writings, rhodes examines and creatively counters the violence of liberal humanism and its objectified “others”—the less-than-human, the unhuman, the creaturely. What shapeshifts from book to book is how rhodes articulates and advocates for our wild indeterminacy even as it exceeds language.
Wayward Creatures, rhodes’ second full-length poetry collection, bursts with otherwise forms that mirror the magical formations of living against the new world order. For rhodes, the work of mattering—of monstering—together and in solidarity with all those historically excluded from the category of the human re-animates poetic form into a poetic practice. As our conversation makes clear, Wayward Creatures is ultimately about how we show up, knowing that our very lives depend on it.
Tala Khanmalek (TK): I have been thinking about your engagement with creatures in this collection and in particular, monsters. You emphasize the liberatory potential of monstrosity even as monstrosity has been levied on non-normative bodies, and crip bodies specifically, to justify subjugation. How do you understand the radical possibilities for existence in monstering up?
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (harr): One of my favorite films is Ali Abbasi’s 2018 Border (Swedish: Gräns) based on John Lindqvist’s short story. However complicated the storyline is (spoiler alert ahead), it ultimately is a very queer/trans and anticolonial film that centers the life of a troll who has been forcibly assimilated into human subjectivity, and slowly realizes and embraces her trollness.
One of the big questions the film invites us to ask is, “who are the real monsters?” and “by what parameters is human society defining monstrosity?” It is an important critique that interrupts the taxonomic violence organizing so much of history and the present, the ways that bodies of color, crip/disabled bodies, queer and trans bodies have been called monstrous and then hunted for it, for the ways we’ve exceeded the bounds of the Human created and enclosed by Western European thought and its political.
At the same time, I’ve been wondering if that—“who are the real monsters?”—is not quite the question we should be asking, as that framing lures us back into a polarizing way of relating in the world as arbiters of moral judgment. I resonate deeply when Michel Foucault says he does not want to judge but wants to bring the world to life, light fires, and multiply our signs of existence. In that sense, I’m less interested in the affective comfort provided by a conversation that exposes who the “real” monsters are. A reversed binary is still a binary: we only create a new hierarchy in that approach.
I’m drawn instead to recognize that we are living in a system that politically benefits from manufacturing villains and from the homogenization and domestication or docilization of bodies, imaginations, life all around; and that, the way I see it, to “monster up” is a radical configuration of existing otherwise that precisely does the work of offering possibility via what will be considered by many to be an excessive aliveness. (I think of the famous moment where Dr. Frankenstein stands over his monstrous creation and declares in both triumph and terror: It’s ALIVE! It’s ALIVE!) In multiplying our signs of existence, in protecting a will to proliferating difference, we open room for ourselves and each other to live (to be alive!) as vibrantly as possible.
In the epigraph I use from Susan Stryker’s essay, which does a beautiful job at transing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stryker suggests that monsters, among other things, are we who appear in “anomalous shape” and that we are “heralds of the extraordinary.” I think about how wherever the imperative toward homogeneity and conformity appears, we often find mediocrity; and mediocrity rarely threatens power. Mediocrity tends to be content with its conditions of muted living. And don’t we want our collective living to be contoured by a kind of daily extraordinary? And mustn’t we insist on making way for that, on being its very omen and source?
TK: Who are the monsters and more-than-human beings that have mothered you?
harr: With Miss Major’s death, I have been thinking about one evening I spent with her and a small handful of other queer and trans activists in my mid-twenties in the office of the Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) in San Francisco. The artist and writer, Tourmaline, has talked about how many queer and trans people Miss Major mothered into their lives as activists. At the time, I was really looking for a political home and unsure where that might be, and what I remember vividly was Miss Major’s generosity and hospitality toward me as someone new to that space. She was funny and warm and conveyed in her own way that there was a place for me there, too.
When queerness is so much about a feeling of unbelonging in the world, to be embraced in that way is such a gift that not only says, “you matter to us” but also calls us into a life of laboring for the world through a sense that our mattering also means we need to do the work of reminding others who’ve been cast aside that they, too, matter.
If we queer a sense of mothering, allow it not to hinge on the western and explicitly gendered one-to-one reproductive relationship to the child as a figure, in part by getting to its etymological root, this question, for me, asks after a wider swath of those who’ve made me who I am. My understanding is that the mat- in maternal is related to the mat- in matrix and mattering, and this invokes an image for me of a wide constellatory interwovenness of that which has made us, that which makes us.
Mothering and monstering then become kinds of poiesis, a poetic process of bringing the worlds of us each into being. In that sense, I feel mothered by infinite beings human and more-than-human, by forests and ocean, butterflies and birds, lightning and stars, by books, by the flourishing of language, by plant medicines, prayers and poems. I feel mothered and monstered and mirrored and mattered by that which persists in its strangeness, that which is moved by a will to exist deviantly in the world.
TK: There are four found poems in this collection, each of which unearth what you call “found prayers” in text that sanctions violence such as Iowa bill S.F. 538 (2023) on restricting access to gender-affirming care for minors. I am curious about your poetic methodology, and how you negotiate the limits of re-signifying language when working with such texts.
harr: The French philosopher, Jacques Ranciére, writes about how moments or acts or discourses of political dissent operate against and outside of the policing order of governance but are also always appropriated by that order and reworked to benefit the system of power in place. I think we are seeing this with the attempt by the Right to render “transgender” and transness—both the word and mode of existence—a threat to social order. But this is also a tactic we can deploy to mess with the forces that want to govern us into submission.
The found poem as a form creates a new piece from an already existing text, often without adding anything new—and poets have often used this method to subvert the weaponry of textual material. For example, I’m taking the text of a piece of anti-trans legislation or a report advocating for conversion therapy for gays, and finding within it the possibility of saying something that undermines its power, mocks it, or altogether rewrites and therefore, reworlds, the world of the text. Laurel Chen’s erasure poem of the N400 form (the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Application for Naturalization) performed at Brave New Voices in 2017 was a stunning lesson for me in the power of this form.
There is also joy in finding humor in it, in imagining the horror or indignation the authors of the text might feel in realizing that the substance of their text—which had intended to do, has done, will do, much violence—actually also provided the very material for its sabotage, that there was a Trojan horse they didn’t catch, hiding in plain sight all along. There are always limits to the power this has, but I do deeply believe that language is a worldmaking device and endeavor.
Lately I’ve been obsessed with this idea that comes from transfemme writer Nat Raha, that helps me crip and think the work of organizing beyond the mandate to be a body on the frontlines in the streets, which isn’t possible for many of us with chronic illness and disability. She suggests that writing is also the work of organizing, that “syntax, punctuation, grammar & the page must still all be mobilized to help create new conditions of possibility.” When we resignify violent language, we are, even if only momentarily, participating in that mobilizing work by disarming the power it has to hurt us. And as many of the best queer and trans comedians have shown us, though we may be brokenhearted, we can also have a good laugh while doing it.
TK: Speaking of prayer, can you share a bit about the role of reverence in this collection, for both the earthly and otherworldly?
harr: Despite having been raised Catholic, I’ve always believed in a kind of implicit animacy in all things around me—which, upon my expressing this as a young person, was named animism by ecclesiastical authorities who deemed it wayward at best and sinful and hell-bound at worst. But those who benefit from power will always be threatened by reverence toward anything that doesn’t serve their own Truth. I feel lucky to have had elders across my life who instilled in me at young ages the importance of a sense of awe, curiosity, marveling at the world and our very existence, as well as a sense of rebellion against any forces that want to diminish that awe.
My grandfather Charles was a white, working-class veteran from the Midwest who dropped out of school after the ninth grade to take on blue collar jobs, but who was kind of a “jack of all trades” and read and cherished the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, among others. I remember being five years old and having conversations about Transcendentalism and Buddhism with him (which later got me into trouble for questioning the existence of hell at Catholic Sunday School). He taught me chess and some basic piano playing and would offer me mind puzzles he’d carpentered himself in his workshop while talking about the malleability of reality in ways that I now know resonate deeply with the principles of quantum physics. All of these things I remember being instilled for him with a sense of wanting to share the joy of marveling at the great wide universe and what we don’t know; the pleasure of curiosity and delight of learning; and a kind of sacredness of the everyday, of witnessing the splendor of divine design in a tree or a poem.
My grandmother, Bette, who was raised in an orphanage in St. Louis, gifted me and my siblings a sense of magic and wonder toward things seen and unseen. She was very attached to her Irishness and the creatures that make up so much of old Irish ways of knowing the world. She kept a cabinet of treasures, and I remember we’d arrive at her house and make a beeline for that cabinet, ask to hold the tiny blue robin’s egg and the nest she found with it, or the antique key that opened it, so wide-eyed and hungry to meet these magics she held safe.
All this to say, these are people who helped raise me and gave me some of my earliest memories of learning reverence for both the earthly and otherworldly. And that reverence by way of cultivated practices of noticing and wondering and holding close to awe as a way of life feels so core to what moves me, what propels me and everything I do in this world. that itself becomes the prayer, and a way to poetry—nesting that awe within and then sharing it with others, being a portal for its vast becoming.
TK: How can the creaturely formations in this collection, following posthumanist projects, encourage us to relinquish the Human in favor of the unhuman creatures we already are or are becoming?
harr: The Human is a liberal project that emerged out of the Enlightenment in the West, and entry into its domain only interests me from the occasional strategic vantage point of how appealing to a status of personhood might lessen violence being done to those of us deemed less-than-human. But overall, Humanism remains an assimilative project, and I’m more compelled by posthumanist endeavors that find possibility in running fugitive from the hold the Human has on us. Entry into the human requires we take specific form and join the project of making that form secure by excising those of anomalous shape from the social body.
For me, creaturely formation refuses pre-determined and settled form and therefore seeks to evade the taxonomic violence subtending material violence. This is why crip/sick/disabled/mad and queer/trans/gender non-conforming bodies are such a threat: we constantly escape any one set definition, and therefore morphological capture, because perpetual transformation of our being and bodily materiality is at the core of our existence.
This collection of poems has been a spacetime where I’ve let myself release a lot of the shame attached to my incapacity to operate in the world within the confines of the Human. I’ve leaned more deeply into the kinship with all things unhuman or more-than-human. I want more of us to give ourselves and each other permission to do that. And I think doing so opens us toward a differently loving ethic and ethos for living.
TK: Can you tell us, in practical terms, how we can engage in the monstering work of “going bad” on the level of our everyday lives?
harr: This idea of “going bad” comes from the epigraph I included midway through Wayward Creatures, from Czech director Věra Chytilová’s 1966 film, Daisies, which was banned by the Czech government at the time. It comes as no surprise to me that she was both a philosophy student and model—her attention to beauty in her films coalesces so brilliantly with her critiques of economic violence, individualism, patriarchy, and power. And her absurdist depictions of bourgeois complacency, consumerism, and authoritarian power feel so relevant to what we are going through in the US at this moment. After wild scenes of debauchery and excess, the audience is faced with the question, “does it matter?” and this for me drums up both ethico-political as well as existential concerns that continue to haunt so many conversations I’m having with peers about the present climate under spreading fascism.
It can be hard to feel like our resistance matters when genocide and policing and carceral violences through state entities like the IDF, ICE, and anti-trans legislation continue. And it can feel lonely when we realize again and again that so much of the world is far more invested in maintaining privileges of leisure, comfort, accumulation, and the social capital of “respectability” than risking it all to reach for something that might mean the elimination of the suffering happening at the hands of both hegemonic and more obvious occupying forces.
In this context, maybe “going bad” is any kind of behavior that shirks respectability politics, refuses the hold of property regimes and capitulation to the status quo (i.e. racist, heteronormative, ableist, bourgeois, capitalist, carceral norms). Maybe it is any life-making that anarchically protests the conditions of the present and the idea that we will find freedom and happiness through bourgeois values and unquestioning loyalty to the nation-state. Maybe it is embracing that our bodies, when contending with illness and fatigue, are actually in moments of workstop, or, as Amy Berkowitz writes, a kind of “passive resistance against capitalism.” Maybe it is giving ourselves and each other permission to break rules, to experiment and be messy and not know how to get where we are going, but to keep trying anyway, to build something else and to be seen as too much, too wild in the process.
Someone I love, in witnessing queer togetherness and community, will often marvel aloud by saying, “who are we to feel so free?” and I think there is a kind of queer audacity that is not only about embracing queer failure, but leaning into the monstering work of “going bad” in a society that wants us to conform and comply. “Going bad” is never without risk, but it feels like an invitation to lean into everyday practices that could be gloriously subversive.
In practical terms, there are infinite ways, big and seemingly small, to eschew compliance with “good behavior” and therefore menace the culture of silence, fear, alienation, numbness, and hyperindividualism that benefits the project of fascism. That can mean so many things, from disalienation efforts like checking in on your neighbor’s well-being, to community safety work like organizing to protect those who are vulnerable to ICE raids or even just accompanying your trans friends in public restrooms, to mutual aid efforts or making art, to cultivating crip access intimacy with those around us, to supporting cultural work like Drag Queen Story Hour. It can be wearing your keffiyah in public, while also building relationships with Palestinians here and abroad. It can be choosing to not have children as much as it can be raising your children with tenderness and attunement to the well-being of others. It can be loving your own oddness in the world and clinging to it as though itself were dearest kin. It can be the sheer act of having fun and accessing play when our bodies otherwise carry so much trauma on the daily. It can be the daily self-care of choosing joy in the face of our collective grief, while also working together to make space to wail and thrash and then pick ourselves and each other up again. It can be a gentleness and generosity with each other, to move always from a place of love that also means loving each other’s freedom.
As Audre Lorde reminds us, we were never meant to survive, and I wish we lived in a world where keeping each other alive and connected was not considered an act of national betrayal but the freedom-dreaming work of BIPOC, queer and trans people, crip/disabled people, and our dissident allies, has always been seen by those in power as a kind of “going bad.” There is so much freedom-dreaming to do, and a million ways to do it.
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About Tala Khamalek
Tala Khanmalek aka mecca monarch is a queer Iranian writer, editor, and scholar with a PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley. Tala is author of The Sun Planters (Asemana Books 2026) and An Infinity of Traces (Blue Cactus Press 2026) as well as the children’s book My Name Means Free (Blue Cactus Press 2027) among other titles in progress.
About heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, nonbinary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, and cultural worker of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of Wayward Creatures (Host Publications, 2025), Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2025), Ephemeral (EcoTheo Collective, 2024), and The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019).
Tala and heidi are the recipients of a 2023 Creative Capital Award in creative nonfiction for a co-authored book entitled Vital Signs.