Description“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” are two canonical works of late 20th century U.S. feminist thought, which expound on the concepts of individual and collective silence, knowledge production and the body. “Silences, Syntax, and Sex: Black Women Poets Moving Past a Culture of Dissemblance in the Post-Black Arts Movement” uses these Lordean texts as a theoretical framework for the selected poetry of black women poets and activists Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez in order to understand how poetry has encouraged black women to cultivate sexual voice and agency in the midst of what Darlene Clark Hine calls a “culture of dissemblance.” This work relies heavily on close readings of these women’s Post-Black Arts Movement poetry (from 1975-1990), historically situating the silencing of black women’s sexuality by dominant, hegemonic voices, as well as by black women themselves. I will argue that Lorde’s modes for understanding the rhetoric of silence and the erotic are directly linked to the creative lineage of the three noted black women poets and their necessity to produce work that breaks collective silencing of sexual desire. Because of the overwhelming lack of critical analysis of black women poets and their work, with specific regard to positive self-sexual perception as a form of resistance, this work intends to present these literary narratives as evidence of the place for sexual subjectivity within political activism.