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Oracle: A Cosmology
Oracle: A Cosmology explores lineage and family narrative by meditating on questions of loss, haunting, resistance, and personal & communal liberation. Entangling narratives of women who have been honed by hardship, this chapbook exists as an archive of intimate kin history. In weaving these true myths, Destiny makes the familial cosmic. Dissolving boundaries between theory and poetry, fiction and self-memorializing, prayers and manifestoes, these poems often subvert forms to fully illuminate sites of melancholy, resilience, and the imagination of alternate realms of being. Exploring memory and mourning, Oracle: a Cosmology gestures towards the possibility of loss as generative and transformative, and grief as a channel to the divinity that is within. In these poems, healing is not linear, but a disruptive and sacred process. Destiny confesses, yes, i still remember how it feels to be / under the swollen tongue of a god’s gaping mouth. This cosmology is one for the people, and the people, they are ethereal.
- GenresPoetry
38 pages, Paperback
First published July 13, 2018
47 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 28, 2018
“here, you have to search again for your prayer language, a language that makes you feel holy even when you do not feel whole.”
I knew from page 1 that this was going to be a fierce, uncompromising collection of poems and Destiny Hemphill did not disappoint. Oracle is about redefining the self in light of and in spite of the past. It is a star map to womanhood not bound up in the divine’s masculine roots.
“when i dare to call on a god in the image of me. when i name myself. when i myth myself”
It is a prayer and a spell-book and a yearning, an homage to black bodies and black mothers and black souls and black trauma.
“not everyone knows how to wear their wounds like velvet like i do”
And overlaying it all is a divine witchy mysticism flowing from the women who have come before, whose blood flows in her veins and whose voices will live forever even as she slips away from them.
“they formed a
circle around you. smelling like rosewater
& peppermints & menthol cough drops. hands looking
like & feeling like mahogany.
they all inhaled your smoke deeply
mmmhmmm.
you remember that black woman
meditative groan.
mmhmmm. something about this one, they said.”
This is one I will be giving away regularly. A beautiful, moving, fierce chapbook of poems.
I knew from page 1 that this was going to be a fierce, uncompromising collection of poems and Destiny Hemphill did not disappoint. Oracle is about redefining the self in light of and in spite of the past. It is a star map to womanhood not bound up in the divine’s masculine roots.
“when i dare to call on a god in the image of me. when i name myself. when i myth myself”
It is a prayer and a spell-book and a yearning, an homage to black bodies and black mothers and black souls and black trauma.
“not everyone knows how to wear their wounds like velvet like i do”
And overlaying it all is a divine witchy mysticism flowing from the women who have come before, whose blood flows in her veins and whose voices will live forever even as she slips away from them.
“they formed a
circle around you. smelling like rosewater
& peppermints & menthol cough drops. hands looking
like & feeling like mahogany.
they all inhaled your smoke deeply
mmmhmmm.
you remember that black woman
meditative groan.
mmhmmm. something about this one, they said.”
This is one I will be giving away regularly. A beautiful, moving, fierce chapbook of poems.
Displaying 1 of 1 review