Austin Segrest is the author of the poetry collections Groom (Unbound Edition Press, 2025) and Door to Remain (UNT Press, 2022), winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize.
Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Segrest is an Associate Professor of English at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he is an active participant in the local arts community. A former poetry editor of The Missouri Review, Segrest holds an MFA from Georgia State University and a PhD from the University of Missouri, and his work has appeared widely in major literary journals, including POETRY, VQR, The Yale Review, and Ploughshares.
In Groom, Segrest draws on personal experience, meandering landscapes, mythological figures, and visual art to examine various intersections of authority, rebellion, and exploitation. In this interview, he invites us “Behind the Curtain” as he considers audience and recalls the creative path to discovery behind Groom, a resonate collection that complicates typical interpretations of shelter with precise language, sonic depth, and striking emotional logic. Read on to learn what writing these poems demanded and how sharing them with the world reshaped the poet’s relationship to his own story, which “never fully / resolves, even after you see the hoof // raised over Saul.”
Megan Hall: Did you have a particular target audience in mind when constructing this collection and/or any goals for how the poems might impact readers?
Austin Segrest: I think the short answer is no. I wasn’t thinking about a target audience in terms of some future book or what was happening in poetry at the time. I really wasn’t thinking about any of that. I did have a very immediate audience for the first poem that kicked the whole thing off, and then the poems started coming pretty quickly.
I was at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown during the seven-month fellowship. About four months in, I’d met a lot of people and, because of the cottage they put me in, I ended up hosting a lot of parties. One night, some local Provincetown men were hanging out late, and we were having a great time. As they were leaving, we were just chatting, and I think they were a little surprised that I wasn’t gay. So I started talking about Steve—partly to explain why I’m comfortable with gay men their age, because they were about the age Steve would be, early sixties. They were taken aback and asked a few questions. It was all very friendly. I didn’t bring it up in terms of abuse, and they weren’t asking explicitly about that either. It was more like, “Oh, that’s interesting. How did that happen?” I remember one guy in particular asking, “How did that go with your parents?”
Those guys left, and that night I started writing “Initiation.”
There was also a very local audience beyond those men, which was the other Provincetown poets. We had a biweekly workshop, and I started bringing in these Steve poems. Everyone was very engaged and encouraging, and that mattered a lot. I also remember talking with a visual artist who, I believe, was a survivor. One thing that feels important to say is that I wasn’t conceiving of this as a book about abuse while I was at Provincetown. I mean, I had written a draft of the book, not a full one, but many of the poems or early versions, before I really got there. I wasn’t in therapy yet. When I talked with this survivor, I described the work as being about this unconventional uncle figure. They asked questions, and I kept saying, “I don’t know; it’s complicated.” And they really pushed back on that. They were like, “No, it’s not.” I was pretty put off by that at the time.
In retrospect, though, I think that resistance may have worked to my advantage. Not because it’s good to be late in working through this stuff, but because I didn’t approach the book thinking, “This is hitting these issues, and I need to be careful, or I shouldn’t do this or that.” I was just trying to explain what it was.
MH: Wow, yes, it’s amazing when outside perspective prompts a whole new line of creative questioning. With that in mind, I’m interested in what you might refer to as “the poetics of hiding” or how we as writers utilize the technology of the poem to hide in productive ways. Do you feel any of these pieces are achieving that, and, if so, how?
AS: I think there is so much hiding in the book, so that is immediately where my mind goes. I love your idea, and it really does strike me as a genuine kind of poetics. I even wrote a review a few years ago where one of the first things I assert, though I don’t remember the exact phrasing, is that hiding is undeniably part of poetry in one way or another.
There is the literal hiding with Steve, hiding him from my parents and family, but also from school and from most of my peers. Not all of them, some were in the mix, but it was always a guarded secret. There is also hiding in the landscape, hiding in creeks and culverts, which I see as a Southern suburban pastoral coming-of-age thing. It very much followed my brother’s footsteps, going off into the woods to explore and to transgress in various ways. That included a lot of pyromania-type behavior, which later shaded into drugs and alcohol. Steve was right there at that moment.
This may sound like a leap, but I was just thinking about this again last night. I am really immersed in myth now, and many of my new poems are almost entirely mythological. Vulcan, or Hephaestus, figures largely for me. He is the son of Hera, and she throws him out of heaven because he is deformed. Almost immediately, he starts making things down in the ocean. He creates a throne for her, makes sure it reaches her, and when she sits in it, she becomes trapped. The gods realize this could only be Hephaestus’s work, so they need him to undo it. Ares goes down first, the tough war god, but Hephaestus defends himself with fire, since he is the god of the forge, and Ares cannot deal with that. Then Dionysus arrives and gets him drunk. There is something in that progression that really hits me as I think about Groom. As I double down on myth in the new poems, I see it continuing the same material. There is a transition from fire to alcohol, from one form of danger to another, and that feels deeply connected. As I write in “The Anarchist Cookbook”:
Once I started hanging around,
I put away childish things, homemade
napalm and flamethrowers. I’d gotten behind
the creek’s veil. I wanted the fire
inside.
Another form of hiding is that Steve’s place functioned, to some extent, as a hideout for queer kids. It was compromised in many ways, but that aspect did exist. As the poem “All the Young Dudes” says, it was a place for guys to be themselves, or to experiment, or to be out. At the same time, I was using Steve’s place to hide from many other things in my life, family issues, school anxiety, social pressures, the need to feel accepted. That hiding was actively enabled.
This was also a culture steeped, especially in the mid-1990s Deep South, in toxic masculinity, which is itself a form of hiding. Hiding behind muscles, behind toughness, behind hair, behind posture. I remember Steve telling me I should cut my bangs, that I should show my face. That idea was completely anathema to me when I was seventeen. Now I can see much more clearly what was happening there. In some ways, Steve’s world offered an alternative to that toxic masculinity. Coming from this all-white, wealthy “tiny kingdom,” I was meeting queer people, people of color, older people, and having experiences that complicated what masculinity looked like to me.
In terms of the poems themselves, another thing I notice is that both of my books revolve around large central figures, my mother in one, Steve in the other. In both cases, these are very complicated relationships. I often admire how directly and confidently some poets write about themselves, who they are, what they want, what they are doing. In my work, at least up to this point, so much of that energy is channeled through other figures. I am often offscreen. You could say I am hiding there, too.
Also, growing up, I was very much in my mother’s thrall. There was a lot of emotional enmeshment, being pulled into her needs at a very young age in inappropriate ways. Obviously, much of that dynamic repeats itself with Steve. It continues even now. As therapists have pointed out to me, I tend to go one-down with people. I put them on pedestals. That, too, feels like a form of hiding.
MH: These poems are infused with a strong sense of place, and, in particular, I noticed the reoccurring image of the creek that is delivered to us in evocative lines like, “No creek is straight, / can assume any shape. Glorified gutter, / convict’s covert where you were first / taken, initiate, convert. An opening…”
What are some ways that you see place (and its features) functioning in the collection?
AS: There were tons of creeks where I grew up, and that was a very early, foundational experience for me. It came directly through my dad. He would take my brother, my sister, and me down to the creek to follow it, to wade in it. There was a whole system of creeks, so you would follow one and then hit another. The area south of Birmingham where I grew up was still largely undeveloped, a lot of hills and woods. In that sense, I did have a kind of idyllic pastoral childhood, at least to a degree.
At the same time, so much sex and drugs and fire and hiding happened in and through those creeks, tunnels, and coverts. The convict image comes from multiple places. Steve was certainly a lawless character who had been in trouble with the law. But even before Steve, when I was maybe ten years old, and I was constantly running around those creeks, there was actually a brief stretch when our parents tried to keep us out of them, which was unheard of because we ran pretty free. Most of our parents worked, so it was very latchkey, not at all what you would now call helicopter parenting. The reason they tried to keep us out was that there was an escaped convict, maybe two, and they were thought to be hiding in the creeks. That specific fear was very much in my mind when I wrote those lines.
Something else I only realized after writing the book is that a big part of our early creek explorations involved a babysitter who I later learned was sexually abusive. I think there is at least some degree to which that tainted those spaces for my siblings and me. Another realization came as I was finishing the book, when I saw how much of Steve’s manipulation worked through nature. Some of the very first times I spent time alone with him were framed as, we are going to hike, we are going to a cave, we are going to a waterfall. Nature became the cover. My siblings and I had this love of the outdoors mainlined into us through our dad. My brother and sister are still big outdoors people. But for me, those spaces feel much more compromised, and that has made me deeply suspicious of the pastoral as a literary mode in general.
I think about that a lot now. Natasha Trethewey has that great poem called “Pastoral” in Native Guard, where she dreams she is with the Fugitive poets, in blackface, posing for a photograph with a fake pastoral backdrop, a cow and all of it, with the city of Atlanta behind them. In that poem, the pastoral is already totally fraught. If you trace that lineage back through the Agrarians and the Fugitive poets, all these ideas about land and Southern identity start to look pretty unstable. I never fully bought into a pastoral ideal anyway. I am from Birmingham, I’m not a barn poet, and I have always been a little too cosmopolitan, and cynical.
There’s a poem in Groom called “Andreion,” which looks back at ancient Greek pederastic practices, where an older man would select an adolescent and take him into the woods under the guise of mentorship and initiation. Sex was built into it, and so was a kind of ritualized abduction. The younger boy was not supposed to want what was happening, but it was understood as transactional: knowledge in exchange for sexual attention. When you start thinking about that alongside ideas of men going into the woods together, camping, bonding, initiation, it all looks very different. Those structures echo forward in ways that are uncomfortable but important to confront. I am very consciously messing with that lineage in my newer poems.
In terms of the book’s landscape more broadly, it is really suburban. It is just south of the city, up in the hills. There is the rumor of a creek running through a girl’s house. There is the waterfall inside Brookwood Mall, imagined as a continuation of the creeks. The hidden outside gets pulled inside. The book keeps returning to what is buried under suburban normalcy.
I was talking with my editor, Peter Campion, about pastoral, and he casually mentioned that in some pastoral traditions, the landscape functions as a character. That idea really stuck with me. The book moves between suburban spaces and the wooded edges like Locust Fork and other areas north of Birmingham that are more closely tied to Steve. The creek, in particular, reaches into every part of the speaker’s life.
Toward the end of the book, the poems start to draw more heavily on Renaissance and early modern pastoral traditions, what has been called the festive green world, pagan, and very much filtered through a British lens. The color green starts to carry multiple meanings: Steve’s eyes, woods, marijuana, myth, ritual. There are references back to things like the Feast of Fools and early Christian or pre-Christian land-based rituals, which poets like Marvell and Herrick were tapping into. I teach seventeenth-century literature, so that material is always in my bloodstream. All that to say, the creeks, the woods, the suburban edges all function as shelter and as danger at the same time. They offer escape from one thing while opening the door to something else entirely.
MH: Mythological tales often feel ever relevant in their moral questioning of how we should respond to trauma and tragedy. Myth seems to complicate this collection in interesting ways. For example, it begins with, “A Prayer to Hermes,” and I really enjoyed other mythical moments along the way like, “He could be Charon waiting for his next / customer, the petty coin of my commission / sealing my shy mouth.” Would you mind sharing how myth inspired you during the writing process?
AS: I think there are a few nodes for me. The biggest one is that I was a classics major, and I started studying myth early. I went to the kind of middle school where it was assumed that advanced English students should be learning archetypes and reading Edith Hamilton. My high school team was called the Spartans. My mom had certain class pretensions and thought that my brother and I should study Latin as part of a classical education. That was supposed to be the key to whatever we became, whether I was a writer or my brother was a lawyer. Never mind my sister. She was petite, so she would be fine.
There is also the statue of Vulcan in Birmingham. If you have not been there, it is one of the city’s claims to fame, this giant cast-iron statue that has been there for most of the twentieth century. It sits right at the edge of the hills south of Birmingham and looks out over the valley where downtown is. That figure was very much in my mind and very close to the Steve orbit. You are constantly looking up at it.
I have always felt there was something Promethean about Steve. As I started writing the poems and poking around in the myths, that connection became clearer. I never knew the myths perfectly, just like I never knew Latin or Greek perfectly. I do not have an encyclopedic brain. I am a poet. I poke around. But with Prometheus, there is always this idea of stealing something from the gods and giving it to humans, or to children, and of a looming punishment. That felt very Steve to me, the theft, the partial getting away with it, and the threat that hangs over it.
As I kept poking around, Hermes became important, too. Hermes is the god who leads souls, who moves across realms, who transgresses boundaries, and who is also the god of thieves. That role kept coming up. And then there is the broader pattern you are pointing to. In contemporary poems about trauma, especially sexual abuse, Greek myth is invoked again and again. You see it in poets like Paul Tran and Ocean Vuong. I think part of that is because the abuser consolidates and capitalizes on a kind of godlike power. That power dynamic is real, and it is incredibly damaging for a young person.
It also makes it very hard to step outside the narrative in which the abuser can do no wrong, in which they are positioned as larger than life. I still struggle to see Steve as an abuser, to not feel guilty about naming that, to not feel like a traitor.
MH: Yes, it’s incredible how these poems deepen our understanding of memory and survival. I really enjoyed considering them alongside visual art: from the striking frontispiece to the Caravaggio inspired ekphrastic pieces and bamboo ink drawings we’re treated to throughout. I’d love to hear about how you find yourself inspired by artistic expression, both in and outside of this collection.
AS: I’ll start with Caravaggio. I had been trying to write about that painting since I studied abroad as a classics major in 2001, when I saw it in person in Rome. It was overwhelming. I came back with a big Caravaggio coffee table book and wrote a poem about it. That poem was one of my earlier published pieces, from when I was still in my twenties.
Looking back now, I can see that poem in conversation with several others I was writing at the time that were also laced with sexual violence. I don’t remember whether I initially dropped that Caravaggio poem in unchanged or revised it first. I think I revised it, seeing that part of the draw, for me, was seeing my own drugged, exposed, vulnerable younger self in Saul in the painting.
I showed it to my friend, the poet Rita Mae Reese. By that point, I had already had the conversation I mentioned earlier with a survivor in Provincetown, and I was also starting to get feedback from journals. There was a lot of interest in the poems, but I could sense that many readers and editors had concerns. They wanted guarantees. They wanted parameters. They wanted more information about how to take the work. It was a different moment, and I also think those concerns were intensified by my being a white man. I understand that.
Rita Mae was exactly the right person to talk to. She said, very simply, that there was more in the painting for me to see. She gave me specific ideas that I later explored more fully in the poem “The Groom” and other poems based on the painting. That alone would have been huge, but she also managed to suggest that there might be more for me to explore around abuse. It took someone I trusted, saying it exactly right.
At that point, I still was not in therapy. Starting therapy, and specifically talking about sexual abuse, was a major turning point. Realizing that my therapist was gay mattered, too. His insistence that I had been sexually abused made it possible to name that without feeling like I was betraying all gay men. That shift opened Caravaggio up even further for me. Rita Mae also pointed me to essays by Teju Cole that were coming out in The New Yorker at the time, which helped me think about Caravaggio as a much more complex figure.
As for the illustrations, that process was unusual. Unbound does not use cover images in the traditional way. They rely on a template and color, which felt strange to me at first because I had gone through the full process of selecting cover art for my first book. Eventually, I realized that interior art might be possible. I had seen another Unbound book with a frontispiece and asked if I could do something similar. They said yes, but I had to find the artwork myself.
I had such an incredible, serendipitous collaborative experience with the cover artist of Door to Remain, Sarah Schulte. I knew how powerful that kind of exchange could be. For Groom, I reached out to local artists. Emmalie Engle created the cut-paper frontispiece. It looks like a woodcut, but she cut every line by hand with an X-Acto knife. My friend Danny Ceballos contributed the ink drawings. He is an extraordinary, multi-talented artist.
I was late in deciding to include interior art and worried there wouldn’t be enough time, so I reached out to a few artists. Emmalie and Danny both came through, almost on the same day. It felt chaotic for a moment. Danny saw Emmalie’s work and immediately said that it had to be the frontispiece. He had given me three drawings, and since the book has three sections, it all aligned. That process also reflects how important local community and working with people around me have been to this book.
MH: I couldn’t agree more that community is an essential part of the creative process, and, as someone who also writes in the confessional tradition, I’m wondering if this collection asked anything of you that you did not anticipate and/or if sharing this book altered your perception of the work in some way?
AS: I think a lot about response, how people respond to things and how I respond myself. Whether it is hearing that someone has died, lost a friend, or responding to someone after a reading or a music set, the question is always, how do we respond? I started thinking about this seriously when my mom died in my early twenties. Before that, I had known people who had lost someone and I never knew what to say. I thought maybe it was better to say nothing. Going through it myself taught me that even the most banal platitudes actually matter. That was a huge lesson for me. I felt genuine appreciation for the people who sent cards, called, or said something, anything. I realized it is not about saying the right thing. It is about responding at all. The gesture itself matters.
I saw something similar happen when I talked to people, including family members, about this book. When people asked what I was writing or what the book was about, and when it became clear to me that it was about sexual abuse, I started noticing how people responded. There were good ways and bad ways. The bad responses came in different forms, but often the person was threatened in some way, especially if they were close to me. One family member simply backed away. One poet, who I thought might help me with the book, began questioning my narrative, worrying about Steve, worrying that I was doing him wrong, that I was misrepresenting him, even though I had been fourteen. There is not really another way around that fact.
I think a good response is some version of, I am sorry that happened to you. That is what needs to be said. And yet it is remarkable how often people do not know how to do that or simply do not do it. Not that I read from Groom to get sympathy. Rather, I think it’s that that knee-jerk “awkward” feeling of not knowing what to say exacerbates the ways that we already struggle to interact with each other.
One specific experience that stays with me happened at a reading in Arkansas. It was a really kind, supportive community, with workshops and a strong local scene. What I noticed when it was my turn to read from Groom was that the room had been conditioned to expect a certain kind of poem. Poems that make recognizable political or identity-based gestures, and that cue a particular kind of response. Snapping, affirmations, a sense of shared agreement.
When I started reading, there were a few initial sounds of recognition, and then the room went quiet. People did not know how to respond. I was not hitting the expected notes. People did not know if what they were hearing was good or bad, or how to place it.
The poems in Groom revisit moments of genuine ambivalence, moments that are uncomfortable, abuse mixed with attraction; moment of righteous clarity as well as moments of guilt and self-blame. That was true to the experience. It is not fair, but it is real.
Sharing this book has been hard. Reading from it has been hard. For all the expected reasons, it makes me feel raw and exposed. I have the feeling that I am making people uncomfortable, which is not my aim. Some poets may enjoy being elusive or out of reach, but that is not what I am trying to do. It is difficult to look out at a room and feel that discomfort.
At the same time, I try to tell myself that when people are thrown off or uncomfortable, that can be a kind of compliment. And it is true that there have been people who have come up to me and said that the work really spoke to them. That matters. I did not plan for it when I started writing, but it is clear now that this is part of the book’s purpose, and that makes it worth sharing.
MH: Thank you so much for your time and insight, Austin. I look forward to jumping back into Groom for another read. Are there any final thoughts you’d like to share with the readers of the world?
All thanks to you, Megan, for your sensitive reading of Groom. I would leave readers with the thought that poetry, as you say, is a technology for hiding, for survival, for self-preservation. It is also a means of emotional nuance, refraction, ambivalence, multivalence, and difference. It says more than can be paraphrased from it, is more than the sum of its parts. Ulterior to ego and agenda, no matter how well-intended, it knows more than we do.