A necessary and long-awaited book. In his best work—and there are at least half-a-dozen poems here that are modern classics—Hemphill is at once confessional and secretive, vulnerable and tough. At one point he states: ‘Consider hatred / to be this: / the absence of everything’. Love, then, would be fullness, presence, the condition Hemphill’s work struggles towards in a world hostile to his existence.
— Luke Roberts, New Left Review
The incendiary, sensual poems of Essex Hemphill, in a new landmark selection
For three decades, the legacy of the revered writer, editor, performer, and activist Essex Hemphill has been lovingly sustained through xeroxed copies of his few published works—as potent now as they were in the 1980s. With tenderness and rage, Hemphill’s poems unflinchingly explore the complex, overlapping identities, the American political landscape, and his own experiences as a black gay man during the AIDS crisis. 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, chapbooks, and Hemphill's literary archive. 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.
A necessary and long-awaited book. In his best work—and there are at least half-a-dozen poems here that are modern classics—Hemphill is at once confessional and secretive, vulnerable and tough. At one point he states: ‘Consider hatred / to be this: / the absence of everything’. Love, then, would be fullness, presence, the condition Hemphill’s work struggles towards in a world hostile to his existence.
— Luke Roberts, New Left Review
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
A master of frank desire.
— Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker
To this day, Hemphill is an ancestor poet whose outspoken cultural activism unites the hopes of Black gay men all over this country.
— Jericho Brown, Oprah Daily
From the collection’s hybrid poem-essay form to the confessional, revelatory, unflinching, and embodied pulse that runs through the text, [Ceremonies] unquestionably altered both what I saw as possible in a poem and in my life. Hemphill centers black queer love as a politicized and radical act, he mines the archive of his memory and bodily experience, he’s brave, urgent, generous, and clear in the poems.
— Saeed Jones
Hemphill’s poems—with their combination of tender lyricism and cutting social critique (and cutting lyricism and tender critique)—feel startlingly contemporary.
— Jameson Fitzpatrick
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
To read Hemphill's poems is to be swept off your feet by unrelenting waves of desire, rage, sorrow, and, despite everything, tenderness.
