SPEED READING: Be Not Afraid of My Body / Darius Stewart
Be Not Afraid of My Body
Darius Stewart
Belt Publishing
Review by
Lauren Parker
Welcome to Speed Reading, our fast, occasionally flippant, review column where we attempt to spread the love of a recent new release in a very short amount of time. We’ll take the time to find some incredible books, you spend your time reading some incredible books.
So, what’s Be Not Afraid of My Body about?
Be Not Afraid of My Body is a lyrical memoir about queer attraction, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, alcohol addiction, and HIV. Those are the keywords, anyway. But really it’s a story of survival and becoming.
And, who’s the author?
Darius Stewart.
What’s their deal?
Stewart is a poet and writer from Knoxville, TN. His work covers queer lived experience, sobriety, and Black lived experience in America.
What’s a single reason to read Be Not Afraid of My Body?
Lyrical memoirs have this powerful quality that can slip beside the reader and bring them in step with the author, and Stewart’s blend of prose and poetry and the uncontainable concept of truth is smooth and honest and will leave you changed.
What are a couple more reasons to read Be Not Afraid of My Body?
As an egomaniacal storyteller, there are very few books that make me want to quit writing. Be Not Afraid of My Body made me want to throw in the towel. Clearly with a storyteller like Stewart on Earth, there is little need for me and I should go find something better to do.
If you’re a fan of these books, you should give Be Not Afraid of My Body a read:
In the Dream House / Carmen Maria Machado
How We Fight for Our Lives / Saeed Jones
Leaves of Grass / Walt Whitman
A small taste of Be Not Afraid of My Body:
It’s the body’s yearning to be sober. The first bead of sweat forming at the temple. It’s subtle tremors in the limbs, a forewarning quake even the animals sense and hence the stampede. It’s lying restless the way electrocution makes one restless. And hair of the dog won’t subdue it. It’s covering the mouth when the volume’s turned to shrill in the third circle of hell. It’s gluttony’s flame engulfing the skin like parchment one’s sin is writ upon. It’s light splintering behind the eyes. It’s fever’s encroachment. It’s phosphene trickery, prisoner’s cinema in a blacked-out room, and not a sliver of fluorescence. It’s cowering beneath sheets, praying to God. It’s the absence of God. It’s the lion’s share of disasters.
A little more from Lauren Parker:
I’m from a lot of pieces with ripped up pavement. A map that tracks the cleared forests and uneven sidewalks that are too icy in winter and get so hot in summer they make your shoes melt if you hold still too long. I was ten when the summer had a personality to it. When it wasn’t just the freedom of school being out, but tasted like sprite and the cinnamon of five cent red hots bought out of the tub at the gas station. Even in the aughts, the penny candy cost five cents, and the shorts were so short that I had to keep my nickels in my ankle socks. I never thought about my shorts before. I never thought about my legs before. I never thought of running when the Jeep pulled up full of older boys with the crouching walk of a wild cat.
When they said, “Hey baby, need a ride?” I was too scared to shake my head. All I could taste was the fireballs and the sprite.
I cracked the candy in my mouth, that stained everything red, red like graffiti and blood and harm. I smelled the sidewalk begin to melt my shoes. I felt every micromuscle of my body and thought this is what being prey is like. And my rabbit heart fluttered and my feeder mouse voice squeaked and I somehow managed to stay out of the Jeep.
I knew after that, I would need to learn to run.
Stewart made me feel that.
