The Terribly Beautiful
By D. Antwan Stewart
ISBN 1-59948-013-1
Poetry chapbook, 40 pages, $7This title was selected for publication as a result of entering the MSR Annual Chapbook Contest.
To say this is the story of our lives.
Who is to say there is a story at all?
To be enchanted by a tune—
"Clair de Lune" from Suite Bergamasque—
when we complain moonlight pales
finer features of the disrobed body:
your sinewy muscles, my clumsy limbs.
To endure amaryllis blossoms season after season,
but the fly’s life will last no longer
than the passing of one hour to the next.
To be the river that empties into the gulf,
and the gulf that destroys land
on which our houses are built.
To misunderstand the world we grieve.
To understand the grief.2004
The Ghost the Night Becomes
Tonight the boy is lost,
his shadow the only companion
sharing moonlight along the stretch
of dirt road. Away from this boy
the road dusts and winds, and where
he travels, it collects flakes of him.
He wonders how he got to this place,
wonders how his body slips between brush
not wide enough to avoid gnarled branches.
And one hand crosses the other as if to soothe
the pain as one tree fallen in the forest
shoulders another. He walks deeper
into this dark place, whimpering
as a child does, hands braced before him.
Beneath his feet, twigs bend and break
a trail behind him, and somewhere
some living thing cocks its ear and knows
that in this forest a boy is lost, and the trail he is making,
some dead thing is covering it up.2004
Self-Portrait at Eight
Once, as I tiptoed across the cold tile floor
of the apartment, to the bathroom, peeking
in the adjacent room, I saw my mother naked.
She slept tethered to my father, oblivious
to my wonder. Breasts rose from the plateau
of her chest, peaked with coal-black nipples
never used for suckling. I stood amazed. My first look
at the female body. Years later, while having sex
for the first time, I wondered if seeing my mother’s
body splintered by early morning light, hearing her
slow, rumbling breath fill the room, is
what beckoned me to the man.2004
D. Antwan Stewart attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he was awarded a Mangam Minority Merit Scholarship in the Department of English and earned other honors including the Knickerbocker Poetry Prize, the Margaret Artley Woodruff Award, the Eleanora Burke Award for nonfiction, and the Ann Hight Gore Thesis Prize. He graduated in 2004 with an honors BA in English/creative writing. Following graduation, D. Antwan Stewart was a Fellow of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and is currently pursuing his M.F.A. in Writing at the Michener Center for Writers, where he is a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry and fiction. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in New Millennium Writings, The Seattle Review, Poet Lore, Bloom Magazine, Paper Street, storySouth: The Best of the South 2005, Lambda Book Report, Books to Watch Out For, and others. He is currently poetry editor for BatCity Review (www.batcityreview.com).
Comments About The Terribly Beautiful
"The beauty of / how gracefully heat dances before the eyes," perfectly reflects the essence of D. Antwan Stewart's opulent debut collection. Here notions of beauty appear and reappear, intensely renewed at each turn by Stewart's technical grace and open-hearted acts of witness. As the paradoxical title suggests, these poems breathe at the crossroads of anguish and joy, desire and experience. The Terribly Beautiful is a brave and intimate, finely wrought premiere. What a pleasure to read the work of a young poet who will no doubt continue to electrify us for years to come.
--Terrance Hayes, author of Hip Logic (National Poetry Series Selection)
Gritty, erotic, and sublime, these poems by D. Antwan Stewart embody the truth and beauty that Keats claimed we need to know to survive. The honesty, precision, warmth and lyrical mystery move us, show us more about what it means to be human. In these poems we recognize the beautiful contradictions, that beauty and the world are not incompatible. The poems are prescient; they see waves and rubble, and what can be salvaged with skilled hands and imagination. What has been rescued is here, in these precise and memorable words.
-Marilyn Kallet, author of Circe, After Hours
In The Terribly Beautiful, D. Antwan Stewart explores desire-from the poignant to the sublime, from the suggestive to the frank and direct. In his "self-portraits" and portraits of others, the human body in all its grief, sensuality, and passion is revealed as nothing short of heroic. D. Antwan Stewart is a poet of both brash and subtle gifts.
--Denise Duhamel, author of Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems
There is a rare elegance in these moving poems by D. Antwan Stewart, a delicacy driven by the speaker's passion for a felt life, a passion so acute the work becomes textural-Keats and his rich palette. Underlying these poems, quietly, is the raw effort "to understand the grief" of loss and self-discovery, all of it conducted under the ever-present threat of HIV and AIDS in the life of being a young gay black man. From the young boy lost in the woods, to his understanding of how the past is threaded through a blue silk robe, these poems muscle up to the hard work of learning how to live with dignity and inner strength in a ruthless world. The Terribly Beautiful marks the introduction of an important new voice, one that has earned its compassion and intelligence.
--Arthur Smith, author of The Late World
What lovely, luscious, luxurious poems are written by D. Antwan Stewart! They restore us to the deliciousness of language and experience. I bask in their intelligence and their beauty, with gratitude.
--Naomi Shihab Nye, author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East