"What is the difference between a god and a Gawd? What makes a woman a HoodWitch? Faylita Hicks speaks masterfully on the homespun magic of Black women, women who use 'dime store candles' and Florida water to heal their wounds and care for themselves in a world that does not care for them. As much as these poems are battle cries, there is a sadness and a violence to them too. Gawdliness demands sacrifice. HoodWitch is a testament to the lineage of power, vulnerability, and strength."

Christina Orlando | Electric Literature

“Faylita Hicks has written a hymnal. HoodWitch, her debut poetry collection, is not a book of worship but a recitation of who we are—madwomen, broken women, discarded and disregarded things—that excises the truth of us down to the molecular level.”

Linden Avenue Literary Journal

"In its evocation of witchcraft, this book provides further examples of efforts to reclaim the language of witchcraft and demonology from the accusers and to repurpose the language to assert a femme vision of authority and autonomy. This book is also powerfully intersectional in its vision, emphasizing specifically black diasporic relationships with witchcraft and also attending to the particular violences and precarities that haunt black girlhoods."

Kathryn Nuernberger | West Branch

"HoodWitch examines what power looks like when reclaimed by Black women and nonbinary people. Considering the unique path of survival that queer Black people have to claim in our society, often alone, there’s something comforting about reading stories of resilience."

Bitch

"In her tremendous debut, Faylita Hicks composes fresh poems out of old photographs, dealing with the deeply personal topics of adoption, partner loss, and nonbinary identities."

Bustle

"Faylita Hicks is not a formally trained witch, but someone well-practiced. HoodWitch. . . is a four-part narrative that explores the dangers and beauty of Black motherhood, the unnatural rites of bringing life into a world where women are abused and children are left vulnerable. The book is a brave offering of blood, water, flesh, and bone, honoring the author’s personal experiences as well as those of 'every single Black girl gone missing.' Creating a work at once intimate and fantastical, Hicks carries trauma and grief yet is immune to pity."

The Rumpus

"At the center of HoodWitch, the confident, crackling debut from Faylita Hicks, is 'Gawd,' whose very name reveals Hicks’s interest in re-creation and self-determination. . . . Drawing on private traumas—birth and death, sex and assault—as well as on public traumas—Eric Garner’s death, the abuse of black girls by R. Kelly—Hicks’s collection lays bare wounds and the cauterizing fire."

 

Emily Pérez | Rhino

"What an exhilarating collection Faylita Hicks's Hoodwitch is. . . . Visceral, riveting, and somehow both heartbreaking and empowering. The words lick at you from its pages like potent flames."

Jami Attenberg, author of "All This Could Be Yours"

"Charged with surreal images and personal history, HoodWitch is an exciting debut that haunts at every possible turn. This richly imaginative world in which all is possible and time and space are merely distant constraints explores the hunger for intimacy and the constant remains of absence. This collection reminds that the truest representation of emotional truth is best derived through the fantastic. Each poem is a special magic that inhabits the deepest parts of the psyche, digs in, and resists forgetting." 

Airea D. Matthews, 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets winner

"The visceral music of this poet's hard-won grace is a liberating testament to black womanhood and what poetry can do. This 'hallelujah to the hoodwitches' is important, necessary, and fearless without a single false note—one of the most original debuts I have read in many years. These brilliant poems are built from fuel and fire. This powerful poet is the future and the truth."

Lee Herrick

"HoodWitch is an incantatory, ecstatic collection brimming with heartbreak and triumph. The speakers in these poems move from child-like curiosity to devastating grief, all while singing a celebratory anthem for blxck wxmenhood. You cannot come away from this book unchanged. This resonant, capacious debut will leave you staggering. Faylita Hicks is just getting started. The world better get ready."

Laura Wetherington, author of "A Map Predetermined and Chance"