This Elegance

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 person 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.

Praise for Derrick Austin

 “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

Art Restorer

What are these figures up to? Who knows.
It’s hard to read a weathered expression.
In an apron, I arrange my tools in rows:
cotton swabs to clean faded, celestial hose,
a scalpel for wax on a distant mountain.

What are these figures up to? Who knows
if angels can curse or grieve Golgotha’s woes.
Leading our gaze, accessories to Magdalene
and Christ, they show us what to feel. Suppose
they look like us, their faces a lost reflection?

What are these figures up to? Who knows.
The panel cracked from heat. An x-ray shows
patterns in the wood I preserve or recondition.
Picture its candlelit past: a draft blows
against chafed pilgrims wrapped in sheepskin.

Recovering the shades and shadows
of different eras and other worlds, I imagine
I do good work here. At last, this corner glows.
Centuries of varnish dissolve. Sickly yellows
leave Mary’s face. Her eyes are wet and sanguine.