This Elegance - by Derrick Austin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This Elegance is a poetic meditation on beauty, pleasure, and transcendence in a time of collective uncertainty. These poems respond to solitude, grief, and fear with a radical inward turn--seeking ecstasy, presence, and the reclamation of self.

Interweaving the sacred and the erotic, This Elegance engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione ("sacred conversation"), a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space. Here, artists, thinkers, and pop icons commune in a similar sacred dialogue--Kathleen Collins, André Leon Talley, Richmond Barthé, Lyle Ashton Harris, Juan de Pareja, Janelle Monáe, Symone, and others appear as guiding spirits and creative kin.

For a Black, queer body so often dislocated from time and place, pleasure becomes an act of resistance--a grounding in the now. This Elegance is a love song--an offering to Black artistry, a tribute to visionary lives, and a testament to the power of beauty in even our most precarious moments.

Review Quotes

"Austin's poems are bounded by conditions of extremity, but unfold, with delicacy and in repose, between those conditions." --Ray McDaniel, The Constant Critic

"In Austin's hands, the exquisite can be ominous while the grotesque can turn charming, and his poems wisely assert that the world is unforgiving and yet full of mercy--that one can question beauty and yet still be beholden to it." --Publishers Weekly

"Austin is a lyrical architect, rendering with urgency and plain-spokenness what is arguably the most challenging kind of loneliness: that experienced amidst others." --Phillip B. Williams, NPR