by Claire Jussel
September 3, 2026
Ampersand Organ by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes; Milkweed Editions; 224 pages; $18.00.
A nebula, a neuron, a tidepool, an ocean, a synapse, and a constellation could each be used to describe the qualities of heidi andre restrepo rhodes’ lyric poem body Ampersand Organ. And yet I hesitate to over-encapsulate this lively poetic macrocosm for you, the reader of this review, should I trample on the poet’s generous and abundant work that resists dichotomies, celebrates the strange, and weaves in glorious echo the interconnected, entangled universe we are a part of.
In the early pages of Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric, rhodes (who does not capitalize their name) introduces the refrain “a body within a body within a body,” which in turn serves as an apt way to describe the unified assemblage of interlinking prose poems within the collection. Each prose poem within the larger lyric body begins with an ampersand (&) which rhodes identifies as a “word for bond, temporary formation of electricities constellating to wild music.” In rhodes’s conception, the ampersand reaches towards and ultimately becomes a typographic representation of radical interconnection. The ampersand blooms and billows across the text, a punctuation portal and mycelial tether.
With Ampersand Organ, the notion of the individual is blurred and enfolded into a radically collective and connective perception of reality. Typically, when writing a review for a poetry collection, I write about the relation of theme, subject, and image. While attempting to articulate these elements for Ampersand Organ, I find that in rhodes’s hand, these elements resist distinction, each forming an un-hierarchical buttress for the other. Any subject matter introduced or image invoked becomes a weighty molecule of greater meaning within the text, if they can even be separated at all. As rhodes writes, “nothing can be atomized. Everything sings of everything else.”
The author sings of autism, queerness, ecology, love, chronic pain, colonization, oppression, the divine, the mundane, the cosmic, and the microscopic all with a wild breadth and depth of imagistic variety. They sing not quite in associative leaps so much as neural networks of association, connection, and recognition of profound enmeshment, as demonstrated in one such litany:
Concentric spiralings reaching into the core of (you people, you lettuces, you chairs, you succulents hanging from the rafters &
dust bunnies under the radiator, you lobster carcass & seaweed & brittle star & hagstone & harbor seal who sweeps across my hip
at high tide.)
Each prose poem fractal spreads, folds over one another, and interweaves in stupendous forms. Variety and surprise in this multifaceted poem creature arruve not as juxtapositions, dichotomies, or unexpected pairings, but as one big “fabric” time space universe sensation molecule. rhodes’s rejection of rigidity and “conventional” conceptions in favor of mystery and kinship forms paths towards striking understanding in which “mountains & endocrine mechanisms understand each other better than any formal grammar.” Their neuro-queer, anti-colonial poetics radically decenter the individual while remaining deeply personal and embodied. Ampersand Organ unfolds in ripples of litany, meditation, ode, lament, and narrative:
& we begin the year by throwing spells into the embered belly of sand cradling driftwood & ash. Drive of fascism’s wight, its chain
froth & choke. Nearby, they Marines rehearse their war, marinating in fear tactic. Drop practice bombs close enough to message
our cochlear tangle: we too, at the center of empire, are fragile as fuck. We know this & still. We marvel at the breaching shark &
tidepool strange, marvel at each other for existing at all.
Ampersand Organ is a Mandelbrot Set of a text. The Mandelbrot set is a mathematical set that when plotted forms a fractal curve that when zoomed in upon reveals magnificent recursion, an endless scope of repeating patterns, worlds within worlds intricate and infinite. Ampersand Organ, like this numeric rendering, encodes and reflects our complex world and patterns latticed across scale and time and forms of being:
Astrocytes exist, constellations in blood. & the heart is not a metronome but an incandescent splash, a more-than[…] & there are
still cellular populations in the body that have not yet been identified. & this is today, the heart is still an outerspace.
rhodes writes with linguistic resplendence, crafting sonic textures and logophilic treasureboxes nestled within lush sensory language. These poetic intricacies all ultimately articulate and reach towards making kin. rhodes blurs the lines between individual and “other” while celebrating the wild variety of beings, shapes, and ways of knowing through deft specificity. They frequently transmute more-then-human bodies into verbs, such as “when I small pond beneath sky I firmamental hold the stars, their aches, their scatterings over relational minutiae.” Erudite glimmers arrive with curiosity and generosity, often accompanied by ampersand-ed footnotes replete with gratitude, sincerity, and playfulness. Ampersand Organ reaches for profound relations across species, time, and place: “& temporal synesthetic wonderment bees me through spacetime folds. What I mean is, I feel you across distance. I feel past & future churn in the ripe meat of persimmons.”
In both form and content, Ampersand Organ recurs and startles, eroding any notion that the startling fresh experience of any one life is at all separate from or at odds with the shared and looping experiences of the collective. rhode’s dazzling and transformative collection at once reminds and reframes what it means to live.
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“Everything Sings of Everything Else”: Radical Entanglement and Lyric Splendor in heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’ Ampersand Organ
POETRY REVIEW
Image by Dave Love from Pexels
Claire Jussel is a poet, writer, and artist from Boise, Idaho. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Wizards in Space, Split Rock Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and SEISMA Magazine. She received her MFA in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University.
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© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
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© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
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