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This Spring, the OA will focus on food.

Through fresh reporting, in-depth profiles, and daring personal essays, this issue will explore what we eat: people, industries, and tastes that both build and challenge our ideas of Southern food.

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Writing about Paintings

By Derrick Austin

Issue 126, Fall 2024

September 03, 2024

For Thomas, 2021, oil and oil stick on canvas by Jerrell Gibbs. Courtesy the artist. From a photograph of poet Kondwani Fidel by Schaun Champion

Near to holiness
                         is the bliss of seeing how others thought
through the questions of their age with line and color.





Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin is the author of the poetry collections Tenderness, winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water. His next collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026. New poems have recently appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Yale Review, and the Sewanee Review.

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