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PRAISE FOR THIS ELEGANCE
Available for purchase at BOA and your local bookstores. Consider requesting This Elegance for your local libraries.
"The poems do not presume transformation; they practice staying—with beauty, with pressure, with the unsteady rhythms of doubt and desire. Perception, fragile and provisional, is carried forward like a lantern cupped against wind. The title grows less like ambition and more like climate: elegance here becomes a way of standing in the weather of being looked at—and of choosing how to look back. Survival does not vanish into strength; it retains tremor.
What the poet models is a devotional practice of attention, softly radical in its refusal to turn away. Neither renunciation nor spectacle, it is a middle state—a bardo, at once reverent, chastened, sensate. It honors what remains after certainty is gone; it reminds us that clarity, like prayer, may be fleeting but still a palpable sort of grace.."
—Jeffrey Levine in Southern Humanities Review
"Derrick Austin’s collection This Elegance (Boa Editions) works in conversation with many nuanced Black and Queer icons like Richmond Barthé and Cher, mixing them throughout as a medium with which the poet can sculpt or paint an image of the self. The poems hold the same quality as the “stillness” of a glacier. Language moves subtly in Austin’s poems but in massive ways; every “small” shift having worldly impact on the rest of the poems.'"
—Madelyn Parker in Puerto Del Sol
"Throughout This Elegance, Austin demonstrates that beauty exists within the conditions that make life difficult, not outside of them. Across poems that move through intimacy, memory, art, and labor, Austin treats attention as a way of staying present inside those conditions rather than escaping them. The collection moves from marshes and tide pools to community zoos and drag bars, from prayer to exhaustion to the small rituals that sustain daily life, and gives each of these spaces equal weight. Through this, Austin defines elegance as a way of seeing that remains grounded in the world as it is: shaped by pressure, marked by uncertainty, and still capable of being rendered into art through care and attention. "