Book Review: Love is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems by Essex Hemphill

Love is a Dangerous Word

Essex Hemphill

Ed. John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr

New Directions Publishing, 2025

Love is a Dangerous Word by artist and activist Essex Hemphill, reaches us three decades after his death. In this new volume from New Directions Publishing, editors John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr, offer a selection of Hemphill’s poetry from Ceremonies, Conditions, Earth Life, and unpublished work, shimmering with queer desire against the backdrop of American Violence and the AIDS epidemic. Within his tenderly powerful, transgressive poetics, generations fold into one another. Hemphill – our beloved queer ancestor – envelops contemporary readers into a collective “we” – we clutch hands, hold waists, brush lips, dance, and love one another free. Our love for one another seeps the soft splendor of roses, carries intimate wisdom, and wields the power to create the world we imagine.

I encountered this book six months into my medical transition. I carried it with me everywhere I went for weeks. Hemphill’s words held me. Each day I live in my body, I am acutely aware of the politicization of my Blackness and transness. Each day I metamorphosize, my body is a site of fear as much as euphoria. Each day of my metamorphosis I am empowered by queer community and strengthened Essex Hemphill’s legacy. Hemphill wrote with unabashed urgency and conviction about the realities of Black queer embodiment in America. His poems depict his intersectional identity as a Black gay man facing homophobia and anti-Black racism holding a love fierce enough to write Black queerness into the future.

The poem, “Heavy Breathing,” spans fourteen pages, with the refrain,

“I’m an oversexed

well-hung

Black Queen”

influenced

by phrases like…”

“…the repetition / of beauty,” “…I am the love that dare not / speak its name,” “…Silence = death.”  Followed by a recurring question, “And you want me to sing / “We Shall Overcome?”

The speaker is raw, embodied, and visible. “Black Queen” grounds the speaker in femininity – sweet, beautiful, dark, loving, lusting – a “diva by design.” “Silence = death,” brings Hemphill’s AIDS activism with ACT UP into the poem alongside queer innuendo. The speaker knows the dangers waiting at the other refrain “at the end of heavy breathing” – destruction. death. grief. Yet, the beauty of Hemphill’s poetics is the coexistence of the queer erotic, threat of terror, and necessity of resistance. In in the poem, “Heavy Breathing,” Hemphill depicts a moment of escape and ecstasy at a drag queen performance,

“We’re crotch to ass

shoulder to shoulder

buddy to buddy

squeezed in sleaze.

We want her to work us.

We throw money

at her feet.

We want her to work us,

let us see

the naked ass of truth.

We whistle for it,

applaud, shout vulgarities.

We dance like beasts

near the edge of light,

choking drinks.

Clutching money.”

In a poem reckoning with sexual violence, drug addiction, and police brutality within the American dream, “a nigga fantasy,” readers join the audience in this moment of reprieve at the bar. We join the collective “we”: wanting, whistling, dancing, clutching and throwing money as music fills the room. This scene is reminiscent of queer night life in Pittsburgh: bodies brushing, dancing in the technicolored dark. Amidst cuts to HIV/AIDS research, UPMC cutting access to gender-affirming care for trans youth, and the pervasive anti-Black racism in Pittsburgh, the city’s saturation in Black queer DJ’s, performers, and parties offers spaces of ecstasy. In the smoky, neon colored haze, I can dance my trans actualization in the presence of my community. This scene in “Heavy Breathing” transcends decades. I find myself swaying “shoulder to shoulder” with my ancestor.

Hemphill’s poetics empower queer creativity in the face of State violence. In the poem, “The Occupied Territories,” the speaker addresses readers with a firm, guiding voice,

“You are not to touch yourself

in any way

or be familiar with ecstasy.

You are not to touch

anyone of your own sex

outside of your race

then talk about it,

photograph it, write it down

in explicit details, or paint it

red, orange, blue, or dance

in honor of its power, dance

for its beauty, dance

because it’s yours.”

Hemphill’s repetition of “You are not” intonates the warnings with a knowing tenderness familiar with the revelation of touch: the power of queer intimacy that inspires us to document its artistry. The voice warns,

“the State wants to seize your bed

 and sleep with you.”

And the final lines read,

“The erogenous zones

are not demilitarized”

Hemphill uses enjambment to position State surveillance in tension with the power tantalizing in queer and interracial touch, portraying the violence of the State as forced intimacy and occupation, speaking to our constrained realities as queer people in America. And his voice offers instruction: document, move, make art, claim it.

This is what I find so grounding about Hemphill’s poetics across decades of time and culture: his poetics drip with decadent, lasting love propagating into the future, “Who dares to tell us / we are poor and powerless?” This love empowers queer knowledge, creativity, and futures in contrast to the destructive, colonial action of the State: “They don’t know we are becoming powerful. / Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming.” In the face of violence and erasure, queer intimacy loves on – alive, possible, and transformative.  

In Hemphill’s poetics, we are held in the collective “We” – our ancestor reminds us that we love the world to expansion. We caress, kiss, photograph, dance, spin, dip, shout, create, and expand the world with our love’s blossoming every day.

–  Amari Onyx, June 2026

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AMARI ONYX is a Black trans writer and artist. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review and is set to appear in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Amari is an editor working within, across, and between genres for 3 Sisters journal. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA where he makes images, vogues fem, and organizes meTamorphosis: a queer and trans reading series. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. 

ESSEX HEMPHILL (1957–1995) was born in Chicago and raised in Washington, D.C. He was a member of the poetry collective Cinque, a frequent collaborator with the Emmy award-winning filmmaker Marlon Riggs, and the editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991). His collection Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992) won the National Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award.