Tenderness

In Derrick Austin’s Tenderness, a century’s worth of grief and joy come together in a “glorious algal bloom,” which is both an image of belonging and not, a place at once fated and also elusive. Such are the soft contradictions of Tenderness, which feels remarkably porous, attentive to the minute, and hesitant to equate intensity with meaning. In “Sadness Isn’t the Only Muse,” Austin writes: “I still love books where nothing happens, / good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.”

These poems demonstrate that you don’t need plot to arrive at insight or discovery and that devastation need not be the only mechanism for catharsis. In the title poem, Austin recalls a summer spent in Europe with friends “Morgan and Danez.” While the poem opens with a sense of despondency: “That summer I was a body. I was that body. The Body,” the speaker is ultimately buoyed by camaraderie, an ongoing theme for Austin. In “Black Magdalene,” we encounter an alternative version of the Magdalene story, in which she “dreamed not of Christ but Her / Ladies”:

She saw Her Ladies in trees,
black women climbing or reclining
on branches, like small, silver blossoms,
and knew them in her heart.

For a woman to “know” anything in biblical terms reads as both feminist and Gnostic, and the very presence of “Her Ladies” here is knowledge. Through these strong choruses of companionship, Austin suggests our friendships are our most constant and least performative intimacies. 

In “Thinking of Romanticism, Thinking of Drake,” we learn that the speaker is “Uninsured. Self-Medicating. Distracting myself.” But we are also witness to the speaker slowly rising to lift Drake into an ascendant figure: “I photoshopped you into Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, / above the Statue of Liberty and Michael Jordan’s weeping dome.” While Austin is satirizing an image often found on the covers of Romantic poetry anthologies, the syntactical choppiness of these lines makes the uplift feel surprising and suspenseful, underscoring the possibility that though we begin in sadness, we may yet end up in the sky.