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, Andre Leon Talley, Richmond Barthe, Lyle Ashton Harris, Juan de Pareja, Janelle Monae, 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.

About the Author
Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, finalist for a Golden Poppy Award, and a Lambda Literary Award; Trouble the Water (BOA, 2016) winner of the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize, finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award, Lambda Literary Award, and more. Austin lives in New York, NY.

Reviews

"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

Book Information
ISBN 9781960145963
Author Derrick Austin
Format Hardback
Page Count 85
Imprint BOA Editions, Limited
Publisher BOA Editions, Limited