REVIEW | This Elegance by Derrick Austin

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.

Austin writes often to the concept of layers & overpainting as This Elegance unfolds. A bruise on a forearm is now pigment, a mark on the skin or on the surface from blunt force; collision. The poem “Homage to Kathleen Collins” begins with an image of art restoration, a line reading: “The team removed overpaint from a Vermeer, which revealed / a painting of Cupid behind a woman reading. Obviously, it’s a / love letter.” This in essence captures the centrality to the collection - unseen layers beneath the surface. As Austin muses on his own paintings and his homage to others, the different voices whether painter, singer, or drag queen become just as much a part of the underpainting of This Elegance as do Austin’s verses on joy, love and sensuality, or loss and violence and pain.

Blue appears several times alongside images of winter chill and snow. Particularly, in “Listening to Vespertine for Twenty Hours Straight” snow evokes a feeling of something beneath that lies dormant. Austin writes “I hate that you can’t hide in the Midwest: / fallow fields, no trees in the distance.” Austin's subtle mastery shines brilliantly, and the reader can feel the tension between the poet having no place to hide in a place that must be left untouched to rest and restore beneath a sheet of cold and ice.

In this collection Austin also grapples with holiness and an estrangement from it. In “After a Year Sober” he ends the piece with these three lines:

“ . . . I learned to love my ungraceful limbs

or like the tinny bells used in monasteries

for prayer to call the body back to the body.”

The lines give the experience of rebirth - despite the complex relationship that Austin’s poems have to “God-fearing” family members, the poet is still practicing monastic-living but this devotion transforms; becomes a love letter. Communal living, and “simplicity” become more personal, Black, Queer, and sacred to every “covered” aspect of the “underpainting.” And there’s something earth shattering about this shift. Within this collection Austin is devout to himself and to the hidden things; to the “sand caught in the paint of plain-air landscape from another century” to borrow the poet’s own words. Revival is akin to Streisand bursting into song, a queer embodiment that becomes the homecoming and return to reverence.

This Elegance beautifully covers and uncovers the layers of the self, taking on new meaning to “preservation,” and as things get eroded or restored, Monastic devotion and self-devotion are one in the same.

This Elegance is available for purchase from BOA Editions here. You can also read Austin’s work originally published by Puerto del Sol here.

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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 Chicago, IL.

Madelyn Parker (They/She) is a creative writing MFA candidate at New Mexico State University. They are the 2025/26 Managing Editor for Puerto del Sol. Her poems have been published in a few print and online publications, including Pedestal Magazine, Barren Magazine, and Red Earth Review. They're also the recepient of the 2025 Academy of American Poets’ Ruth Scott Poetry Award.