"The poems of Austin Segrest collected in Door to Remain are elegies for the speaker's mother, who died suddenly when he was living with her after graduating from college. Segrest's place-oriented poetics reads the environs of Birmingham, Alabama, where the speaker was raised, and of Atlanta, Georgia, where his mother was raised and died, "as a form of lifeblood," according to Adrienne Su. The collection searches out meaningful cultural and emotional overlaps between son and mother, taking into account her family background and life before, as well as during, the speaker's coming-of-age in the Deep South. Through supple inventions of form and allusions to musical as well as literary forerunners, the poems of Door to Remain touch on the familial, cultural, psychological, sexual, and physiological damage and disease that shape us. The poems take particular aim at the devastating pretentions of the so-called "Old South." But the work also aims to salvage and illuminate transcending passions and communal participation, as well as, and in accord with, shared suffering. Segrest's unflinching excavations of personal memories remind us, as David Rivard writes of the collection, "of how our losses are shared. And being shared, they may be borne through that door that remains open to us still, despite it all.""--