Love is a Dangerous Word

For three decades, the legacy of writer, editor, performer, and activist Essex Hemphill has been lovingly sustained through xeroxed copies of his few published works. They are as potent now as they were in the 1980s. With tenderness and rage, Hemphill's poems unflinchingly explore the complex, overlapping identities of sexuality, gender, and race, the American political landscape, and his own experiences as a black gay man during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Love is a Dangerous Word contains selections from Hemphill's only published full-length collection, Ceremonies-named one of the 25 most influential works of postwar queer literature by the New York Times-alongside rarely seen poems from magazines and chapbooks. It serves as both an introduction to Hemphill's poetic prowess and a treasure trove for those who have long awaited his return to the literary spotlight.

"When I read a poet like Essex Hemphill, my heart just comes up in my mouth and does an African folk-dance on the back of my throat….He's making something that has never been made or said before. He gives me hope and strength." -- Audre Lorde
"If I’d met him I guess I’d have just said thank you." -- Dev Hynes
""Hemphill was really the root for me." " -- Jericho Brown
""Reading Ceremonies, I learned a name for our rituals and ways, saw the experiences and magic that made us all unruly kin."" -- Danez Smith
"I'm so eager to get this I'm salivating!" -- Reginald Harris
"Love is a Dangerous Word is both a triumph and a testament to what queer individuals have had to endure... vigorous in its range and intimate in its approach to what it means to be a queer man of color fighting for the simple right to love." -- Gabriel X. Hendrix - The Gay and Lesbian Review
"Love Is a Dangerous Word by Essex Hemphill is as comfortably chatty as it is heartbreaking reminding that “Even hope is a device”; each poem is somehow prescient and new at once, writing of desire and death and daylight." -- Poetry Northwest
"‘Hemphill was dangerous. Is dangerous. The danger he embodied saved lives, mine included. I am alive and somewhat sane because he wrote with such bravery and clarity, with every fibre of his being behind the pen." -- Danaz Smith - Frieze

Essex Hemphill (1957–1995) was born in Chicago and raised in Washington, DC. 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). Hemphill received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. His collection Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992) won the National Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. John Keene is the author of Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions. His most recent book, Punks: New & Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Robert F. Reid-Pharr is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and the author of Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique; Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual; Black Gay Man: Essays; and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American.

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