Be Not Afraid of My Body

A poet's "dazzlingly propulsive" memoir of growing up Black and gay in Knoxville, Tennessee (Kaveh Akbar, New York Times-bestselling author of Martyr!). 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. 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. "A memorable portrait of Black gay life, from poverty and adversity to accomplishment and poetry." -Kirkus Reviews "A mammoth creation . . . Just unbelievably rich art right here." -Kiese Laymon, New York Times-bestselling author of Heavy