From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up. Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee--and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet--he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart's explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones's How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.

Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Stewart, Darius

Community & Culture

Belt Publishing

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: Poems is Darius Stewart's first book-length collection of poems drawn from his three previous chapbooks in addition to new poems not collected in those volumes. The result is a book that is more than the sum of its parts, but one that coalesces around themes of love, addiction, violence, sexual identity, and the corporeal body to betray the intimate moments that illuminate, especially, Black gay male experiences.\nDiscovering the self is fraught enough, let alone under the ever-present threat of HIV and AIDS. Ranging from the private to the confessional, the lyrical to the narrative, the elegiac to the celebratory, Stewart's writing is gritty, often blunt, but always beautiful as he strives to understand the grief of lost love and lost youth without losing hope.

Intimacies in Borrowed Light: poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

EastOver Press

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Books by Stewart, Darius