Since I laid my burden down

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Average Rating
Publisher
Varies, see individual formats and editions
Publication Date
2017.
Language
English

Description

An uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with “more layered insight than the page count should allow” (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News).DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?A modern American classic, Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw and searing look into the intersections of memory, Blackness, and queerness.

Whiting Award winner Brontez Purnell’s debut novel is an uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with “more layered insight than the page count should allow” (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News).

 

DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?

 

A modern American classic, Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw and searing look into the intersections of memory, Blackness, and queerness.

 

"An antidote to the rigamarole of gay lit." —Mask Magazine

 

"Slim yet potently realized, with a lot to ponder." —The Bay Area Reporter

 

Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told.” —Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave

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ISBN
9781558614314
9781558614321

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Published Reviews

Publisher's Weekly Review

Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel. The thin plot centers on DeShawn, a gay black man approaching middle age, returning to small-town Alabama after his uncle's death. He moves back in with his mother, a powerful and demanding Baptist preacher with a shrinking congregation. DeShawn's daily encounters send him down nostalgic rabbit holes about the men he has lost through death or other circumstances. He remembers his first lovers, the neighborhood boy who molested him, his stepfather's rages, and other experiences of his deeply constrained Southern upbringing in the 1980s. After fleeing to California at 18, DeShawn falls into an aimless string of sexual encounters and a counterculture lifestyle. While these vignettes do not build up to a coherent narrative, they are carefully drawn, occasionally very funny, and frequently affecting. The even-keeled, almost deadpan way Purnell lays out these tragedies, failures, and losses and the casually explicit tone offer a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Kirkus Book Review

Sex, drugs, punk rock, and Sunday sermons. When DeShawn takes leave of his fast life in San Francisco and returns to his rural Alabama hometown, he finds time to slow down and contemplate his past and the many menfathers, lovers, and friendswho have made him who he is. Purnell's debut novel (Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger?, 2015, etc.) is structured as a series of flashbacks to DeShawn's childhood and young adulthood, which is peopled with an abusive stepdad, a feuding mother and grandmother, and kids who share his love of 1990s punk music, partying, and sexual experimentation. Sex and self-fashioning are at the heart of this narrative, and the novel is refreshingly frank about desires both normalized and taboo. DeShawn, whose queerness becomes obvious to his family and community early on, must navigate sexual interactions with kids his own age and the leering adult clergy and teachers whose own desires are warped into power trips (DeShawn "marveled at how much of his young adult life was spent in a room getting spanked by a dirty old white man"). DeShawn's path of sexual discovery is linked to his discovery of self, and as his story unfolds, questions of who, and how, to love become more clearly articulated. DeShawn is a wild child, but he is also an uncle, a nephew, a son, and a community member. Purnell treats his subjects with a heavy dose of dry humor, as when DeShawn's "fag-loving aunt" gives him a handful of Klonopin after a funeral and tells him "Don't overdose, bitch." The novel's style is messy, and DeShawn's inner dialogue doesn't always provide much depth. But DeShawn's story, like any honest story, is a messy one and, for all its rough edges, entertaining. A complex, sometimes overly frenetic, look at one man's experience of being black, queer, smart, soft, tough, artistic, and constantly in motion between rural and urban cultures. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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Publishers Weekly Reviews

Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel. The thin plot centers on DeShawn, a gay black man approaching middle age, returning to small-town Alabama after his uncle's death. He moves back in with his mother, a powerful and demanding Baptist preacher with a shrinking congregation. DeShawn's daily encounters send him down nostalgic rabbit holes about the men he has lost through death or other circumstances. He remembers his first lovers, the neighborhood boy who molested him, his stepfather's rages, and other experiences of his deeply constrained Southern upbringing in the 1980s. After fleeing to California at 18, DeShawn falls into an aimless string of sexual encounters and a counterculture lifestyle. While these vignettes do not build up to a coherent narrative, they are carefully drawn, occasionally very funny, and frequently affecting. The even-keeled, almost deadpan way Purnell lays out these tragedies, failures, and losses and the casually explicit tone offer a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire. (June)

Copyright 2017 Publisher Weekly.

Copyright 2017 Publisher Weekly.
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