This Elegance

By: Derrick Austin

Published by BOA Editions, Limited, 2026-05-05

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.