Intimacies in Borrowed Light, my first book-length collection of poems, brings together poems from three previous chapbooks—The Terribly Beautiful, Sotto Voce, and The Ghost the Night Becomes—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.

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.