Book Description

“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 way 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. Ranging between Atlanta, Georgia, and the Eternal City of Rome, these poems offer a poignant chronicle of haunting by a mother who is simultaneously present and absent even before her death. The centerpiece of the book is a poem in nineteen sections entitled ‘Majestic Diner’ that strives to answer its own epigraph, from George Herbert: ‘My God, what is a heart?’ Elsewhere, the poet writes ‘Humankind / cannot bear to be cheated out of our most guarded truths,’ paraphrasing T.S. Eliot’s dictum that ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ and part of what makes this book memorable are the clear-sightedness and charity with which those truths are anatomized.”—Karl Kirchwey, author of Poems of Rome and judge