This Elegance

By: Derrick Austin

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Paperback | 1 May 2026

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Paperback

Dimensions(cm)
22.8 x 15.2

Paperback

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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, Andre Leon Talley, Richmond Barthe, Lyle Ashton Harris, Juan de Pareja, Janelle Mone, 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.

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