Divine, Divine, Divine

Divine, Divine, Divine is a gorgeous text with an operating principle of abundance. Summerhill sees his people capable of a great many things — of loving, of uprooting the canon, of dancing along the sometimes treacherous lines of their own history. And for this, the poems within this book each have their own pair of wings. I was grateful to have this book as my own small mirror, through which I saw a fuller version of all my possibilities.
– Hanif Abdurraqib, Poet, Essayist, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster (2019) and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), and the book of cultural criticism Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019)

What language do Black people have or must dig up for themselves to remember who they are, especially in a language that never intended to remember them at all? In Divine, Divine, Divine, Daniel B. Summerhill shows how Black folk make beauty out of tragic circumstances by creating that magic in poems that inhale Black life and exhale its song. Summerhill speaks to the heartbreak and music cohabitating Black consciousness, the nuances of Black identity and the permeation of racial awareness during childhood. This collection is a necessary breath in how Black language evolves, is abandoned and then reclaimed, how it switches codes to aid in our own survival, how it can name us and we can choose how to be named. And ain’t that in itself, divine? Absolutely!
– Danielle Colin, Poet, Cave Canem Fellow, author of Dreaming in Kreyol

The language in Divine, Divine, Divine simmers with the burn and echo of ghosts. These poems are both ode and elegy for the body and the scar it makes to mark healing and trauma. The electric doubling back to images of voice, tongue, mouth, and song ask the reader what instruments, what incantations, will keep the body safe? What must the body become when the divine is decoupled from salvation, when the best hope for a prayer is that it becomes a blade?
– Natalie Graham, Poet, author of Begin with a Failed Body