Sotto Voce

By D. Antwan Stewart

ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-099-2
Poetry chapbook, 40 pages, $10

This title was selected for publication as a result of entering the 2007 MSR Annual Chapbook Contest.

Author Bio / Comments / Samples

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Samples

Dusk
after Amaud Jamaul Johnson

 

begins with simple house cats
crouched
behind the queen palms,
where herons rustle
water's edge, a pond
giving up
the mountain ridges,
reflecting shades
of pink and each cat
indistinguishable
from the other,
though there is light
enough to see each feline
belly-crawl
through short grasses--
this sight so beholden
to hints of rain
tracing the air
with scents of spring,
the sky the pale cheek
of herons
unsuspecting two cats
creeping along
the grass like clouds
before the gathering
of storms.

Sotto Voce

 

In the apartment above us,
our neighbor plays the violin

horribly. Mozart by the sound
of it, but I can't be sure. I want to

ask, but you're fast asleep,
or at least pretending to be.

A light breeze through the curtains
whispers the noise into our room

and I can almost forgive it,
but I have to contend with

the snore caught in your throat,
which I suppose is your subtle way

of saying a duet with this indelicate
violinist is better than a conversation

with me. It's always been this way
between the two of us, mimicking

the frailties of two lovers
who have nothing more

in common than a fox has
to its prey. You were always

so cunning. You'd have to be
to pretend this music is tender.

Are you dreaming of our neighbor?
The sadness in his face as he plays?

How a clink in the body's machinery
has forced a migration of his senses?

Is our neighbor at the window
shivering the way this music trembles

every nerve in my body
with ingratitude? He seems

to gesture with his bow for you
to come to him, your snores softer

as the music becomes more intolerable.
This is how I know tonight

you've left me forever. Though I will
feel fine in the morning, will not

throw fits. I will feed upon this
knowing as if it were a sacrament.

As if heaven. Though there will be
a sadness you must understand

will never return me wholly as I was
before. If you listen, you can hear

the music blessing me with a gradual
diminuendo. It's almost bearable now.

So I will sleep now, next to you, enduring
as best I can the quiet

of your sleep. Hope if I can ease
my way into the cave of your body

I can withstand this breeze sifting in,
this gentle stirring in my bones.

Even Bones

Don't tell me the tongue's
Not a magical place.

--Clare Rossini

You can't deny the tongue knows the magical
places the body tenders on those garrulous nights
when too many vodka tonics loosen the muscle,
secrets unraveling more like proffering too much
information about the balloon-knot pucker
between the legs-it's a celebration, like realizing
one can perform pirouettes in sensible shoes,
though we prefer the spangled ones, but we take
what we can get, are delighted when one inspired
move turns anodyne to sublime: a thread-through-needle-eye
precision of the tongue navigating various routes
of the insatiable body-those unknown places
where even bones quiver the way a river slicks
then swallows whole all the various stones.

 

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D. Antwan Stewart was born November 27, 1979 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He matriculated at Tennessee State University in 1998, transferring to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 2001, where he graduated in 2004 with an honors B.A. in English. He has held fellowships at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin, where he received his M.F.A. in Writing. In 2005 his chapbook, The Terribly Beautiful, was also a finalist in the Main Street Rag Editor's Choice Chapbook Series. Other honors include an Intro Journal Award nomination, finalist status for the New Millennium Award from New Millennium Writings, featured poet at the Austin International Poetry Festival, and the James A. Michener Scholarship at the Poetry Festival at Round Top. His poems appear in Meridian, Callaloo, DIAGRAM, Pebble Lake Review, the Seattle Review, Tupelo Press Poetry Project, storySouth, Poet Lore and others. (www.batcityreview.com).

 

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Comments

 

D. Antwan Stewart has crafted poems that are sincere, intimate, disturbing, funny, and sad. He shows us how the ordinary becomes poetry and how poetry becomes music. To the Italians, Sotto Voce is an expression meaning to speak under one's breath. Stewart speaks to us in a hushed voice, but it arises out of a vicious house / of ghosts // that haunt. The spirit of these poems is gentle. But the impact is fierce.

--Hayan Charara, author of The Sadness of Others

 

"One can perform pirouettes in sensible shoes, / though we prefer the spangled ones." In Sotto Voce, D. Antwan Stewart documents the passionate rush of male-on-male sex; the heartbreak of hitting false notes in love; and the dangerous gaze of a boyhood spent observing men's bodies glisten[ing] like rhinestones mined from a cave / deep within our ghetto. These complex and graceful lyrics move effortlessly from queen palms, / where herons rustle to the well-lit savage part of the city, detailing natural and urban pleasures, domestic and sensual mysteries. This is a subversive, elegant collection that merits reading and re-reading.

--Carol Guess, author of Femme's Dictionary

 

In Sotto Voce, D. Antwan Stewart's newest collection, are poems that explore physical (and metaphysical) connections (and barriers): here is a deeply attentive gaze that uncovers signs and omens everywhere. The subject, of course, is longing, and the language is nuanced, tender, organic yet often surprisingly fresh in its precise rendering of moments and metaphors.

--Ron Mohring, author of Survivable World