"Ezili’s Mirrors thoroughly and carefully mines the utility and uniqueness of multiple spiritual and thought traditions, aesthetics, and sources of knowledge. . .. Ezili’s Mirrors is important because through it Tinsley shows us ways that black femme life and black queer life exists and asserts itself as other than the abject, the undesirable, the inappropriate, and the excessive." — Alexandria Smith, The New Inquiry
"I have longed for a book as daring as Ezili's Mirrors." — Meredith Coleman-Tobias, Reading Religion
"Tinsley’s black queer, post-colonial work of Vodou theology refuses to be easily categorized. A combination of social theory, black history, and highly poetic prose, her analysis deconstructs and reconstructs black queerness through 'theoretical polyamory' (author’s term), which she uses to trace relationships with several Vodoun spirits of Ezili. . . . An unapologetically difficult and deeply rewarding read for those interested in any intersection of the above topics, and especially in decolonizing reality." — WATER
"Tinsley weaves feeling and sensation through her words. . . . By showing gender not through the matrix of heteronormativity but through performances of attachment to things not seen, especially the spiritual and the ancestral, Tinsley makes gender an extension of black diasporic practices of survival. Explicitly ignoring shame and focusing on multiple forms of pleasure and connection, Tinsley shows how creative gender-making can be a site of healing and black feminist theorizing." — Amber Jamilla Musser, TDR: The Drama Review
"This pathbreaking work prompts Black feminist and queer diaspora scholars to use their academic training not as an endpoint, but as a point of departure, emboldening scholars to turn to whatever sources that are necessary to write books that will sustain alternative forms of knowing under increasing conditions of precarity in Black queer diasporic lives, loves, and labor." — Darius Bost, The Black Scholar
"Once in a great while, a gem of a book comes along. It is not only elegantly written and astutely composed, compellingly and courageously argued, but it also opens up new and generative ways of looking at the African diaspora and the disciplines devoted to its study. I am talking about Tinsley’s Ezili’s Mirrors. I read the book with intense joy, on many levels: its theoretical polyamory, its dazzling methodology, its engrossing narrations, and the different senses it calls on." — Gloria Wekker, TSQ
“Ambitious and iconoclastic, Ezili’s Mirrors is truly a work ‘for the children.’ . . . Those who come after her—mutivariegated, sparkling black women and femmes, striving to create an academy that more closely resembles them—will benefit from the opening Tinsley has rent in the fabric of academic writing convention.”
— Marina Magloire, New West Indian Guide
“Tinsley’s commitment to [Vodou/Vodoo epistemology] as method makes Ezili’s Mirrors a valuable model for thinking black [trans] gender, because it insists that everyday black diasporic ways of knowing—‘not queer theory, not gender politics’ (4)—make black gender creativity possible and, as a result, are how black gender should be known.”
— Cameron Awkward-Rich, American Quarterly
“Ambitious and iconoclastic, Ezili’s Mirrors is truly a work ‘for the children’ (p. 187). Those who come after her—mutivariegated, sparkling black women and femmes, striving to create an academy that more closely resembles them—will benefit from the opening Tinsley has rent in the fabric of academic writing conventions.” — Marina Magloire, Asian Journal of Social Science
“Challenging traditional reading practices so as to generate original and convincing comparative analyses, Ezili’s Mirrors is at once an extraordinary piece of scholarship and a true work of art.” — Kaiama L. Glover, author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon
“In this utterly original and necessary work Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley reorients the study of Ezili’s spiritual, philosophical, and material corpus in ways that offer new understandings of blackness and black feminism. This magisterial achievement looks to the future—toward Tinsley’s daughter, and the students who will no doubt take this work as a new holy text.” — Jafari Allen, author of ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba