Testimonials

"How splendid it is to encounter a book of such refinement that also understands so intimately that the kingdom of poetry is a land of mixed feelings, and that the best poems are not occasions for moral arousal; they are the documentation of intellect, an aesthetic sensibility and the writer’s linguistic prowess as it engages in the work of soul-making. But the task Segrest takes up here is an arduous one, as it explores the line between damage and desire, affection and manipulation, and the poems don’t give us easy answers. In fact, they provide no answers at all; instead they ask questions of the deepest and most profound order: how much of the self is our own creation? How much of the self is made of what has been done unto us? I am enamored of Austin Segrest’s Groom for its brilliance, its discernment, its broken, golden and tenderly reconstructed heart."

- Mark Wunderlich

"An honest poet is rare. Let me not deceive me, implores our speaker in this astonishing and honest collection from Austin Segrest [Groom]. The past is slippery. Honesty is rendering people, places, things, and ideas with the dignified complexity they require. Honesty is different from truth, did you know?"

- Paul Tran

"There are some poets we admire for a mastery that allows them to tell a story, express an epiphany, form a conclusion, all gracefully and even memorably, yet language in some ways remains external to them. But there are other poets in whom language seems to arise spontaneously, fulfilling a design in which the poet’s intention feels secondary. Books by these poets we read with a gathering sense of excitement and recognition at the linguistic web being drawn deliberately tighter around a nucleus of human experience that is both familiar and completely new, until at last it seems no phrase is misplaced and no word lacks its resonance with what has come before. Such a book is Austin Segrest’s Door to Remain."

- Karl Kirchwey

"[Groom] is one of those rare books of elegy in which mourning for the dead turns into mourning for an entire era. The ambivalent truths the poet tells about his life with and without his mother, as well as her own complex way of taking stock of her own troubled life, are rendered in beautifully transparent language that is accurate, taut, down home in its inflections, and sophisticated in its literary savvy and accomplishment. Segrest is always pitch-perfect."

- Tom Sleigh

"Many terrific things can be said about Austin Segrest's Door to Remain – that these are evocative poems of place, that the collection has a powerful narrative arc, that the poems' formal mastery dazzles – but none of them alone captures what a good book it is. The Southern landscape is not so much a landscape as a form of lifeblood. The poet's fierce, honest reckoning with the mother he lost too early infuses the poems with urgency equal to their artistry. As for the artistry, the music and precision of each poem's construction are deft, true, and absorbing. It’s a book you can inhabit, and that likely will inhabit you."

- Adrienne Su

"The love child of Elizabeth Bishop and John Donne, Austin Segrest rejuvenates sensation and feeling for our time. His Door to Remain penetrates existence with x-ray vision and a recognition of affliction’s gifts. In part love’s forensics, in part a tour of humanity’s confounding bonds — familial, cultural, personal — the book finds, in our frayed worlds, language that expands and illuminates. Scored by The Shirelles, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Etta James, and the pulse of contemplation, Segrest’s book is a life study for the new century."

- Amy Newman

"From the initial "Just" of "Meet the Beatles" to [Groom's] closing words, "another minute," Segrest probes these questions of loss and longing with an astonishing, liminal musicality."

- Jessica Murray

"Austin Segrest's poems are small miracles of compression."

- Image Magazine