BOOK REVIEW

Derrick Austin’s This Elegance

By Jeffrey Levine     May 5, 2026




This Elegance
Derrick Austin
BOA Editions (2026)
85 pp. $19 (paperback)

To live alertly, to practice seeing when clarity is not a refuge but a reckoning. Derrick Austin’s This Elegance opens with the sense that witness must be earned and that perception itself carries risk.

The opening poem, “Black Bile,” offers an early lesson: the gaze may draw us into complicity or, perhaps more dangerously, into desire. The speaker watches “a car and carriage,” a wounded horse, “two of the horse’s legs / bent in ways I’d never seen,” and confesses, “if those men touched it, / I thought I’d see my shadow’s other face.”

Already the poems suggest that to see truly is to be changed, perhaps painfully, by what is seen. In poem after poem, perception arrives like a barometric shift: “I’m always thinking about being watched: / it’s a weather in my mind.”

That notion might serve as the artistic fulcrum for the collection. Attention, here, is both vigilance and vulnerability. Austin risks a kind of devotional attentiveness, one unsheltered from pain—a way of seeing that refuses to separate desire from danger. Canisia Lubrin’s opening epigraph, borrowed from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, sets the tone: “Elegance is a curation of insistences where no interest remains subjugation. Imagine: concentrated sensibility for pleasure despite terror.” In Austin’s hand, this becomes both thesis and threshold: What if elegance is less refinement than a way of enduring the world that refuses us, a world too difficult to bear.

The poems are drenched in visual thinking. Looking is often a spiritual act, but one that may lead us to instability rather than solace. A quiet ars poetica, “Writing About Paintings,” crystallizes the instinct:

Near to holiness
is the bliss of seeing how others thought
through the questions of their age with line and color.

If this is not holiness itself, it’s something near to it—a humility central to Austin’s voice. Ekphrasis here is method rather than description: a borrowing of the painter’s gaze when one’s own vision trembles. In “Homage to Kathleen Collins,” a Vermeer is partially uncovered and Cupid reappears behind a reading woman. The question isn’t merely what art reveals, but what we can bear to see:

Is desire now a theme or a mood? Is the bowl of apples and
peaches tipping over? Is someone on his way?

The restored Cupid destabilizes the image. Love was always in the frame, even when obscured. So too in these poems: longing is the underpainting, a pentimento, beneath every scene. And as the day proceeds, the body bears witness to change: thickening pollen, fish dead from algal bloom, “sunshine and wind” disturbing the mind. The speaker closes the window “so I can rest,” yet fixes on a frame that is “swollen / and warped.”

Perception alters the body; it reshapes its borders. Ekphrasis, then, becomes not an aesthetic gesture but a form of survival.

James Baldwin wrote that to look and not look away is to suffer. He maintained that the refusal to see is the deeper moral failure, just as Simone Weil, whose ethical gravity echoes throughout this collection, called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In these poems, attention is not aestheticism: it is a wager.

A kind of exposure.

The speaker often seems to ask: What will I owe the world once I have seen it truly? And what of myself will be altered by that seeing?

This strain becomes explicit in “June 2020,” a poem of lockdown, protest, dread, and domestic ritual:

I wash my sheets / during a national coin shortage […]
Afraid / of catching Covid or / a case / or a cop’s billy club, / I don’t / join the march downtown.
I donate to bail funds for protestors / trashing a Confederate / monument

There is no overarching verdict, only the quiet tension between helplessness and care. Is proximity enough? Is witness a form of participation—or a way of keeping conscience at a safe remove? Weil once said that “the beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth.” These poems walk that labyrinth with both devotion and doubt.

Many of the strongest poems turn inward: “Spiritual Autobiography,” “Jesus Year,” “After a Year Sober,” “Prayer Inscribed in an Anchorhold.” These form neither conversion nor narrative. Rather, they are records of the body thinking its way toward presence. “Of course I acted a fool after coming out,” begins one, “Years of hidden anger hunkered by my door well, / a strange animal no one taught me to feed.”

In “Jesus Year,” the arrival of grace is neither triumphant nor despairing:

I drink the glamour / even when it makes me sick.

I have my doubts.
My affirmations: Be kinder
to yourself.

Spiritual life, then, is an atmosphere, a negotiation; faith is offered as trembling continuance, a staying-with, a persisting, a living on without guarantee. The body is neither transcended nor scorned. It is asked, instead, to remain.

Solitude in this book is porous. It admits visitation. In “Sunday Tea,” companionship arrives through ritual:

We’re the only Black gay men in our building,
so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups.
For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his.

A passing of lineage, the older man’s photographs—friends in their youth, fade haircuts, magazines, laughter—are offered as evidence that art and the will to survive must sometimes share a table. In “Grande Dame,” the drag matriarch Cherry Jubilee refuses trend and insists on presence:

Operatic, self-possessed, Cherry takes it slow,
plucking tips with her acrylic claw. We’re in her thrall.
Quiet as it’s kept, I bawl.

This is no spectacle of identity. It is a liturgy, drag as pedagogy, a ceremony of endurance. Kinship here is not inherited; it’s composed. Proximity is sometimes all the body needs in order not to vanish.

Though seldom rooted to one locale, the poems carry a Southern undertow—a spiritual humidity, an alertness shaped by a military childhood and cultural pressure. As the speaker notes in “Diary”: “My family lived where the government sent my father. / I was the sergeant’s boy. I was very good / at memorizing capitals.”

Geography here is learned as performance; selfhood becomes perforce adaptive. In “American Portrait,” crisis adopts the hues of gallery light and wildfire sky:

Police fired tear gas at picketers […]
I click a photo of a molten sunset
in Boston, hazy from fires to the north

No sermon follows these scenes. What remains is a form of ethical suspension: a refusal to summarize. A Southern documentary impulse remains, but the poet is not chronicling so much as dwelling—in what Fred Moten might call “the burdened glance.” In Austin’s lexicon, that glance becomes a devotional practice.

What, then, is the book’s quiet thesis on elegance? Neither comfort nor refinement, but composure under pressure. Elegance becomes a way of honoring one’s own persistence without erasing doubt or damage. In “To a Buffalo at the Community Zoo,” empathy must be earned:

What thrives where there’s no trust? / Divided from the grazing herd […] / Like me, are you guarded?
Washing your beard in a plastic basin, you are pure force.

Here, attention becomes respect: a gaze that neither claims nor demands. It watches. It stays. In “After a Year Sober,” that same attention finds its way into ritual:

their chanting / was like house music pulsing in the gay bar
where I learned to love my ungraceful limbs […]
like the tinny bells used in monasteries / for prayer
to call the body back to the body.

The gay bar and the monastic cell—both spaces of initiation, both modes of devotion. The poem refuses to rank them; one pulse runs through both. We begin to understand: elegance is not transcendental—it is the body consenting to remain.

In the end, This Elegance has the good sense not to attempt to resolve its inquiries. It inhabits them. 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.

We might call it tenderness. Or endurance. Or Baldwin’s discipline of seeing. But Austin gives it another name, quiet and precise: “If elegance be concentrated sensibility for pleasure despite terror, [. . .]”

Perhaps that is enough.



​This Elegance by Derrick Austin

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JEFFREY LEVINE is founder, Artistic Director, and Publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning literary press. A poet and essayist himself, he is the author of several acclaimed collections and the recipient of twenty-seven Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems and hybrid essays have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Poetry International, Missouri Review, Barrow Street, Ekphrasis, Colorado Review, and Western Humanities Review, among many dozens of others. In addition to his editorial and publishing work, Levine teaches poetry seminars, consults with nonprofit literary organizations, and is widely recognized for his exacting editorial guidance, his devotion to emerging writers, and his ongoing exploration of lyric craft, attention, and moral imagination. Find out more at jeffreyelevine.com.