In Groom, Austin Segrest confronts the intricate architecture of memory and power, examining how formative relationships shape and alter us. Through a masterful sequence that moves between past and present, these poems map the complicated territory where mentorship blurs into manipulation, where desire tangles with control. With striking clarity and remarkable formal precision, Segrest explores how we process and survive what shapes us, transforming a difficult personal history into art that reveals that "someone has heard."

Austin Segrest is the author of Door to Remain, winner of the 2021 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize and the Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award. Originally from Alabama, he lives in Appleton, Wisconsin and teaches at Lawrence University. His poetry appears in Poetry Magazine, VQR, The Common, The Yale Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. He was a 2018-19 poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

"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

"Presided over by Hermes — god of the crossroads, god who in the same gesture gives and takes — Groom is a devastating verse bildungsroman. In another poet's hands, this book might have evolved as a simpler survivor's testimonial. Instead, Segrest marshals his artistry to flay open a relationship where threat feels twinned with rescue. What do these wrenching poems teach us about being groomed? That a boy neglected by his own parents might protect his abuser because he himself feels like 'a barter/ between silences.' That a child, flattered by an older man, is warmed by 'the sweet fire, paler than grass, of being noticed.' That kids let in the back door of an adult sexual world are under the 'illusion/ of gaining access,/ rather than providing it.' Segrest's speaker is wise as well as sadly witty. Comparing his vulnerability to Paul's in Caravaggio's 'Conversion on the Way to Damascus,' he recognizes that 'it was a raised hoof, // not love's roof, / you were raised under.' So why would that boy, now grown, maintain an uneasy contact with his groomer? The poems show us that it's because, once upon a time, the groomer's eyes 'when he came home / [were] like a dose of naloxone reviving / lost boys sprawled across his couches.' Groom's spare, sharp, whip-smart language lights up, 'like coals in a clamshell,' an intricate abyss of need and trust and betrayal." — V. Penelope Pelizzon

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered to witness the chimerical unions of thought and feeling displayed in Austin Segrest's latest intensity, his second poetry collection. The title, Groom, is noun and verb, passive and active, a pliable hero topping a three-tiered cake. These poems bear a classical weight with the candor of intimate conversation, and find beauty in the wreckage of Gen X's suburbia. Who here hasn't acted against their own best interest in search of something that might answer to the word 'love,' only to find the 'contempt a host/ harbors for the one guest who showed'?" — Gregory Pardlo

"An honest poet is rare. Let me not deceive me, implores our speaker in this astonishing and honest collection from Austin Segrest. 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? Not unlike it, Segrest asserts that freedom and respect must be earned. At times, it must be taken. Hewn from life, from hard-won half-knowledge, the phonic echoes, sense details, and calibrated pacing of these poems transport us from caves in northern central Alabama to Damascus, they bring us far into the interior of bewildering and bewitching beloveds, and by the time they return us — we leaves out of nowhere turning back to soil — we arrive at new understanding of what it means to be chosen as the object of attention. In attending, and objecting, Austin Segrest brings into our hands a chance to go back on all we thought was right, and as our speaker ardently, honestly claims, It was right." — Paul Tran

"Austin Segrest's Groom captures an age, a place, and a time with stunning clarity. It is a transformational mapping of 'the boundless private' through apartment complexes and parking lots and Birmingham nights spent in the shadow of Vulcan, where secrets, loyalty and desire are weaponized. If you too were a teenager made from a 'disproportionate amount…of night' (and aren't we all?), these poems are essential reading." — Rita Mae Reese