This Elegance

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 Mone, 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.

Author Biography

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.