Praise for Oracle: A Cosmology

"What is more dangerous than a black girl that understands the etymology of her own name? What is more dangerous than a black girl that taunts her haints and jumps ropes with heirloom’d nooses, writing her own freedom? Speaking with a dialect of “been here” taught unapologetically by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston and writing with the new hand of Ntozake Shange, Hemphill’s poems are prayers and blueprint. Are inquisition and reclamation. In the hands of our black ass hands, these poems are pulpy and lush and dangerous in its reckoning. Black girls with this kind of awakening have always been a force, eclipsing your basic ideas of who we be. "

— Mahogany Browne, from her introduction


"There is a radical, revelatory hunger in these poems; it weaves through you as you devour them, demanding of your body a full blood-response. Get ready. Destiny Hemphill has built for us a feral collage of voices—ancestral and present, both equal parts delicate and audacious. Her work is spare, unapologetic & transcendent, pulling into focus the shimmering brilliance & terrible vulnerability of being a Black womxn who refuses to be un-made: i come from the stars / no, i’m no beam of light / yes, i am the burning / but mostly the pockets of black heaven, / black aether / in between.”

— Rachel McKibbens, author of Blud


"Ack right is a juice, a liquid—like what fills you, washes you; but could also douse your fire or drown you. Depending on who pours. Destiny Hemphill's Oracle: A Cosmology eyes the hands that tilt the cups. In these high-definition snapshots, Destiny freezes the flow, asking, by turns: Are you thirsty? Are you that thirsty? It all depends on who pours. Drink down this ill elixir of monstrous magic and simmering memory Destiny Hemphill's poured up. Get your ass on this ack right."

— Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies


"Oracle: A Cosmology is a staggering world of a book. Destiny Hemphill gorgeously messes colonial archives that dictate saving occurs through conquering. These poems exist in and on her terms. But here “her” does not mark the boundary of an ego; “her” is a binding to “mama-n-em,” southern black womxn who come before and alongside. Where those most American rituals of mysoginior (attempt to) disappear the bodies and interior lives of black womxn, Oracle holds forth lineages and possibilities of black femme loving, forging tongues and other maps that lead back and forward to the roving, infinite self. These poems shake the dirt from the roots until the nourishing truth gleams."

— Claire Schwartz, author of Bound

An excerpt