Haunt Me

« Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner »

We don’t get to choose who haunts us. In Haunt Me, José Enrique Medina opens a door between worlds—the living and the lost, the remembered and the repressed. These poems drift through memory like a haunted house: Abuela slams the door to keep out the devil’s children, the dead drink beer at the bar, and silence smells like ruda and regret. A mother never returns, but her absence grows roots. With dark humor and aching tenderness, Medina conjures Mexican family life, queer whispers, and sacred forgiveness. This collection asks: What do we inherit from those who vanish? And what becomes of us when the ones we long for stay silent—while those we tried to forget come back, again and again, to remind us who we are?

From the Author
After my mother died, I didn’t feel her presence. Instead, I felt other ghosts—complicated, not always kind ancestors—who stayed close, as if asking to be remembered. Writing these poems became a way to sit with them, to explore the ways even difficult legacies shape us. As I wrote, I began to understand why my mother hadn’t appeared: maybe she had already given me so much of herself, she didn’t need to. Maybe she was in my blood, indistinguishable from my own voice. Haunt Me doesn’t try to resolve grief. It leans into it, allowing memory, contradiction, and longing to coexist. The poems point to the possibility that goodbye isn’t a disappearance but a transformation, something that continues, quietly, in the life that follows.