This Elegance by Derrick Austin

This Elegance

$35.00
$35.00
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This Elegance by Derrick Austin
  • This Elegance by Derrick Austin
This Elegance

BOA Editions

This Elegance

by Derrick Austin

$35.00
$35.00
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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.
Book Details
Publisher:
BOA Editions
ISBN:
9781960145963
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
85
Authors:
Derrick Austin
Published Date:
2026-05-05
Language:
English
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African American & Black All Poetry Death, Grief, Loss LGBTQ+

About Derrick Austin

From Homestead, Florida, Derrick Austin holds a BA from the University of Tampa. He received an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2014. His debut, Trouble the Water, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and came from BOA Editions in 2016, going on to finalist placings for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award and the Lambda Literary Award in gay poetry. Tenderness followed from BOA in 2021 and This Elegance in 2026. He has held Stegner, Ron Wallace and Amy Lowell fellowships, and won graduate Hopwood prizes at Michigan.

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