Trouble the Water

February 15, 2016
In his debut collection, Austin maintains that fraught balancing act of being lighthearted, even convivial, in the face of worry and distress. He also deftly manipulates the tension between beauty and artlessness, sensitivity and violence, as in the poem “The Bait,” in which he writes “your kindness,/ drawing me out of myself, is not a knife/ entirely.” The speakers of these poems often feel like hyperintelligent yet emotionally guarded friends who, as an evening wears on, begin to reveal their wounds. The atmosphere is as humid as the Florida landscape Austin brings to life, full of heat spells and sweat-slick bodies. Occasionally the descriptive language and religious iconography can grow as heavy as Floridian air, as when the vellum of an illuminated manuscript is “supple as with her tears,” but the abundance of such acts feels generous. Look at all of this, the speakers seem to be saying, the beautiful and the repellent at once. This collection is well-suited to readers prepared interrogate what they love and what they distrust. 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.

Starred review from April 1, 2016
Austin's remarkable debut collection opens with a quote from John 5:46 For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had foreshadowing how water, religion/spirituality, and body focus become vehicles to explore being black, homosexual, male, and a human being in a troubling century. Austin's search for meaning and wholeness leads torealms artistic, sexual, and sensual, where body parts become flowers or bodies become twin planets, where hurricanes can leave behind corpses or a storm-smoothed shore. San Souci epitomizes the sophistication of form and thought in Austin's poetry by using an effect resembling Versailles' Hall of Mirrors as the poem's speaker reflects on paintings, how they reflect life, his body, his lover's body, how he can see his lover as a painting or see the act of pleasuring another artfully reflected back to him. Whether encountering European catacombs or the Gulf Coast's post-oil-spill devastation, all of Austin's lyrical poems are poignant and empowered.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)