Essex Hemphill’s treasured and defiant legacy as both an activist and poet, is elevated by editors Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene, with Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2025). Hemphill’s genius is integral to a multi-voiced African American literary history, especially since he was keen to honor both his poetic ancestors and contemporaries during his lifetime, including Phillis Wheatley-Peters, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde. Love Is a Dangerous Word is both necessary and long-awaited, containing selections from Ceremonies (Plume, 1992) alongside other rarely circulated poems. Readers new to Hemphill’s poetry will be stunned by his directness on the page, while longtime lovers of his work will be reinspired and reawakened to his genius—his authentic blend of vulnerability and rage.
With a simultaneously confessional and secretive style, Hemphill’s brilliance lies in the balance of risk and relief, of surviving and thriving. Poetry is a liminal space of fact and imagination for queer writers, myself included, with opportunity for both veiling and revelation. In “Heavy Breathing,” a long-form poem found early in the collection, Hemphill’s voice on the page bravely speaks truth to the Black, queer, and male intersectional identity, in many ways defining what it means for poetry to be both lyrical and social critique. The presence of the “I” at the start of the poem builds steadily, from appearing once every few lines to a tight section of repetition:
“I prowl in scant sheaths of latex.
I harbor no shame.
I solicit no pity.
I celebrate my natural tendencies…”
The “I” accumulates across the pages, later transforming into a collective “we.” Hemphill reinforces the interconnectedness of experience and asserts the speaker’s role as threefold: immersed in experience, witness to life, and bard—conveyor of truth on behalf of the masses. “Heavy Breathing” resonates with Adrienne Rich’s “Diving in the Wreck,” in which her speaker evolves to hold multiple genders and quantities in lines such as “we dive into the hold. / I am she: I am he” and “We are, I am, you are.” Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (Graywolf Press, 2014) also features an expansiveness of the poetic speaker in moments like “I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was / done could also be done, was also done, was never done—.” Love Is a Dangerous Word functions on these levels expertly—attentive to craft while remaining in conversation with reality, not existing in a vacuum.
I admire how Hemphill plants his feet firmly where he stands throughout the collection, announcing and insisting on his existence to a world that ignores, dismisses, and harms him. He speaks with power on the page, not only for his own survival but to prevent further destruction for his people trying to stay alive despite war—abroad and domestic, amidst the AIDS epidemic, and while functioning within a society designed by systemic brutality. In his introduction to Love Is a Dangerous Word, Reid-Pharr recalls a conversation with Hemphill, who once asked him, “How are you going to call spirits if your house is not in order?” In his quintessentially frank way, Hemphill encompasses a complete, complex, and intersectional reality of America. He asks how we can connect to others on the scale of time—past and present. He also speaks of how the war in Vietnam (and elsewhere) mirrors the violence experienced every day in America by Black people, queer people, and queer Black people. Still, Hemphill goes beyond simply calling out what he sees; he dreams, he offers suggestions, he rallies. In “For My Own Protection,” Hemphill starts:
“I want to start an organization
to save my life.
If whales, snails,
dogs, cats,
Chrysler, and Nixon
can be saved,
the lives of Black men
are priceless
and can be saved.
We should be able
to save each other.”
Hemphill skillfully uses candor here, creating a statement that appears simple on the surface while acknowledging desire. He wants to make safety possible, and he is willing to start, lead, and sustain an organizing body to do it. The speaker silently admits that no one else is volunteering to save his own life, so he must, and he is happy to create a precedent in which mutuality and community become part of the equation so that others can be saved, too. The poem ends in what emotionally feels like a dare, a call to action, yet is phrased as an honest, humble question: “All I want to know / for my own protection / is are we capable / of whatever / whenever?” Hemphill’s speaker is open and public about his self-interest in the matter, and yet the inclusion of the “we” immediately places the responsibility, the challenge, and the dream in a space of collective power. Are we endlessly powerful? Are we full of possibility? Could lightning strike now, or now, sparking revolution and subsequent peace?
The collection’s titular phrase comes in “Under Certain Circumstances,” a poem the editors Reid-Pharr and Keene strategically, and satisfyingly, placed about halfway through the book, creating the heart of the collection. The postwar and queer speaker here is nostalgic for both the past and the future. He is “lonely for past kisses” and longs for his past, yet also confesses:
“Romance is a foxhole. This kind of war frightens me. I don’t want to die sleeping with soldiers I don’t love. I want to court outside the race, outside the class, outside the attitudes— but love is a dangerous word in this small town.” The speaker’s rumination on the future—a future of loving and of simply existing— completely expands after the em dash into a more philosophical, somewhat cautionary sentiment. The addition of “in this small town” after “love is a dangerous word” acknowledges the possibility that love is less dangerous in a big city, for example, and the speaker could go there. And it’s true that historically larger queer communities can more often be built in urban spaces, as there is greater proximity and more abundant resources. This doesn’t discount, however, the fact that queer love exists elsewhere. With these lines, read from a different approach, Hemphill perhaps offers his readers a comfort: that of time and possibility. I lingered over this stanza at length, at first naturally excited to find it within Love Is a Dangerous Word. When I looked back up to the top of the page, noting the title again, “Under Certain Circumstances,” I remembered that circumstances change. The speaker here, as in every poem, expresses desire. He wants to love many people, to connect and kiss and be loved. Maybe he doesn’t need to go elsewhere; rather he can lean into the inevitability of transformation to create change right where he is.
Throughout Love Is a Dangerous Word, Hemphill’s cravings and sexual appetites layer over the grief, and are embodied in a speaker whose voice is honest and sexy. There is death in this collection—in battle, on the streets of America, from illness and bullets, from inauthenticity and yearning. Counteracting this is queer joy, often found in the safety of the queer club scene of the time. Hemphill describes: “drag queen’s perfume / lingers in my sweater” and “I’m an oversexed / well-hung / Black queen.” In “The Brass Rail,” a call and response lights up on the page:
“CALL Dancing with the boys on the edge of funk. RESPONSE Twilight. CALL The boys danced, darling. RESPONSE My tongue CALL touching you indiscreetly. RESPONSE walks along your thighs like a hermit. CALL Your body a green light RESPONSE I have been naked with you. CALL urging them to be familiar. RESPONSE Dear Diva, Darling: CALL You were in the mirrors, the light. Their arms.” Here Hemphill blurs the lines between speaker and syntax, with the call and response instructions often switching mid-sentence, requiring the synchronicity and trust often abundant in such clubs and dance halls. The men (and all humans) who found truth in expression and love in this radiant, textured, very much alive world also carried tremendous grief, loss, and sorrow. The despair was, and continues to be, defeated by an insistence on togetherness. Hemphill writes, “don’t let it be loneliness / that kills us… don’t let loneliness / kill us” in “Heavy Corners.” That poem starts and ends with these reminders, these pleas for survival, creating an atmosphere of hope.
The mesmerizing talent of Essex Hemphill is both a legacy and a gift. He once said, “My blessing is this. I do not stand alone bewildered and scared”—a sentiment as urgent today as during the height of the U.S. AIDS epidemic and during the Vietnam War. Hemphill asserts himself proudly, all the while suffering his own anxiety over being the next to die among his people. Love Is a Dangerous Word, therefore, asserts the power of love, a force ancient and inherent in all of us, which we can harness to witness each other in both pain and lust. While Hemphill admits, “My grieving is too common / to arouse the glance of angels,” he also dares, “Who will save our sweet world?” pointing his finger at the reader with one hand and another at himself with his other hand. Together.
In “Rights and Permissions,” Hemphill’s speaker plainly says, “I go on being,” which is the most radical act of all. This is both the call and the response of Love Is a Dangerous Word, the brilliance of Hemphill, the question and the answer we readers and poets all need. In an interview published in The Bennington Review, Jericho Brown—the poet whose admiration of Hemphill first brought me to know him—describes the dominant modes of American poetry today as hyperaware of the social. He explains that amid today’s political crises, there is an intense concern for being on the right side. Brown adds that poems also need to be complex and precise, though the type of precision can vary. Despite being a posthumous collection, Love Is a Dangerous Word honors Hemphill’s acuity toward real life that embraces precision and nuance without concern over right and wrong. Right is simply true, simply Hemphill’s, and made possible in poetry by celebrating his personal insistence on expression to combat fear, and on honesty to combat despair.
