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Intimacies in Borrowed Light
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.
Discovering 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.
Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place, said of the collection, “The radiant poems in Darius Stewart’s Intimacies in Borrowed Light invite readers into the full and evolving vision of a brilliant young poet as he explores the nuances of his own identity and experiences as a Black and gay artist in urban Appalachia and beyond. We encounter first loves and lost loves, family members struggling to take care of one another, and an emerging writer engaging with timeless works from Magritte and Debussy to Louise Gluck and Jack Gilbert. Those of us who read Darius’s work from the early days have sought these poems out and watched as they became harder and harder to find: to hold them together now in one substantial volume is a joy. The central, intertwining themes of this book are announced right in the title—intimacy and light—and Stewart’s poems make the world feel more closely held and better lit, easier to love and harder to take for granted.”
Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations, National Book Critics Circle finalist and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, said, “Darius Stewart’s Intimacies in Borrowed Light thrums with ecstasy and extravagance even as his speaker charts the vagaries of the body, the inevitability of grieving and loss. A finely wrought debut, Intimacies in Borrowed Light heralds Stewart as a bold, emerging voice.”
Discovering 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.
Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place, said of the collection, “The radiant poems in Darius Stewart’s Intimacies in Borrowed Light invite readers into the full and evolving vision of a brilliant young poet as he explores the nuances of his own identity and experiences as a Black and gay artist in urban Appalachia and beyond. We encounter first loves and lost loves, family members struggling to take care of one another, and an emerging writer engaging with timeless works from Magritte and Debussy to Louise Gluck and Jack Gilbert. Those of us who read Darius’s work from the early days have sought these poems out and watched as they became harder and harder to find: to hold them together now in one substantial volume is a joy. The central, intertwining themes of this book are announced right in the title—intimacy and light—and Stewart’s poems make the world feel more closely held and better lit, easier to love and harder to take for granted.”
Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations, National Book Critics Circle finalist and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, said, “Darius Stewart’s Intimacies in Borrowed Light thrums with ecstasy and extravagance even as his speaker charts the vagaries of the body, the inevitability of grieving and loss. A finely wrought debut, Intimacies in Borrowed Light heralds Stewart as a bold, emerging voice.”
- GenresPoetry
150 pages, Paperback
Published July 19, 2022
32 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 26, 2023
I had the honor of listening to Stewart read a series of Self-Portraits from this collection at AWP.
Often, it's more difficult for me to get into narrative and biographical poems, but I'm glad I spent time with these vignettes into childhood/boyhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, as well as elegies for vulnerable people brutalized and murdered.
One of my favorite poems was "As A Boy at the Elder's Knee, I Come to Understand Hallelujah." I'm fond of reported speech and this poem encloses a mysterious mini-sermon that seems both cautionary, portending an early death that the young child should accept as his fate, and epiphantic, since the speaker refuses to pray and instead wonders, "if everything we've ever been told is true." It seems like a moment of individuation where the speaker chooses to keep those generational pieces of advice that are empowering and leave what isn't.
Another stand-out is "HIV Blues," which actually also is comprised entirely of a dialogue between self and Self. There's a replacement of the "blues" in the title to "a poem about loss" that the beleaguered-speaker desires for comfort, then that poem becomes "sad songs" on a mixtape and finally, "opera in foreign languages." Here the poem really opens into the metaphysical when the more-wise self explains, "out of the greatest miseries survive/the greatest beauty."
The hope here feels grounded in the hard work of self-love. I appreciate poems that move past easy and saccharine type of messages and into those deeper bittersweet moments of perspective and growth and grief and connection.
Often, it's more difficult for me to get into narrative and biographical poems, but I'm glad I spent time with these vignettes into childhood/boyhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, as well as elegies for vulnerable people brutalized and murdered.
One of my favorite poems was "As A Boy at the Elder's Knee, I Come to Understand Hallelujah." I'm fond of reported speech and this poem encloses a mysterious mini-sermon that seems both cautionary, portending an early death that the young child should accept as his fate, and epiphantic, since the speaker refuses to pray and instead wonders, "if everything we've ever been told is true." It seems like a moment of individuation where the speaker chooses to keep those generational pieces of advice that are empowering and leave what isn't.
Another stand-out is "HIV Blues," which actually also is comprised entirely of a dialogue between self and Self. There's a replacement of the "blues" in the title to "a poem about loss" that the beleaguered-speaker desires for comfort, then that poem becomes "sad songs" on a mixtape and finally, "opera in foreign languages." Here the poem really opens into the metaphysical when the more-wise self explains, "out of the greatest miseries survive/the greatest beauty."
The hope here feels grounded in the hard work of self-love. I appreciate poems that move past easy and saccharine type of messages and into those deeper bittersweet moments of perspective and growth and grief and connection.
March 19, 2024
Review - 4.5 stars
Darius Stewart's Intimacies in Borrowed Light is haunting. It's beautiful. It is something historical, and archival, even. Cataloguing chapter after chapter of a life lived steeped in trying. Trying to survive growing up in dysfunction. Trying not to 'succumb' to one's desires. Trying to obtain a lover, a relationship, a clawing of connection that can transcend eternity. Trying, to exist, in a world where death claims that which is precious. That which is loved, revered, and held dear.
Stewart dazzles, delights, and maybe even depresses. Packed with beautiful illustrations, the pages of this collection will ensnare and enthrall you. As you too, become historian. Secretary. Reviewer and accountant of life and history. I found this to be a deeply moving and touching read. One that I will happily, and gladly, recommend to others.
Special attention should be given to poems like:
HIV Blues
My Mother's Hands
Intimacies in Borrowed Light
Swan Song
Blue Silk Robe
Darius Stewart's Intimacies in Borrowed Light is haunting. It's beautiful. It is something historical, and archival, even. Cataloguing chapter after chapter of a life lived steeped in trying. Trying to survive growing up in dysfunction. Trying not to 'succumb' to one's desires. Trying to obtain a lover, a relationship, a clawing of connection that can transcend eternity. Trying, to exist, in a world where death claims that which is precious. That which is loved, revered, and held dear.
Stewart dazzles, delights, and maybe even depresses. Packed with beautiful illustrations, the pages of this collection will ensnare and enthrall you. As you too, become historian. Secretary. Reviewer and accountant of life and history. I found this to be a deeply moving and touching read. One that I will happily, and gladly, recommend to others.
Special attention should be given to poems like:
HIV Blues
My Mother's Hands
Intimacies in Borrowed Light
Swan Song
Blue Silk Robe
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews