Böcker av Devon Walker-Figueroa

From the celebrated author of Philomath, an astonishingly inventive collection of poems illuminating human, planetary, and personal survival.Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies, obscure natural phenomena, and flagrant apocrypha, these poems calculate the debilitating and contorting costs of survival. “You find your family, / your whole phyla & future, buried / in some encyclopedia & glean / how small the risk of eternity,” she imagines, addressing the consciousness of a “Lazarus species”—creatures thought vanished, even while they live.Here, classical poetic forms meet postmodern notations and aerospace architecture meets Babylonian hymns, all of them wrestling with the aberrant existence we yield to in life, and wield against other lives. We read into the worlds of a tormented Lawrence of Arabia, our special ancestor Australopithecus, Tesla’s space dummy Starman, and other brilliantly posed figures and sagas in indelible spaces like “The Euthanasia Coaster,” a “Desert Theater,” and “Paradise Lust.” Conceptually driven and blooming with a lyricism at once tender and razor-sharp, Lazarus Species knows no bounds in the exploration of an evolutionary, archeological, and interstellar vision.

Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.With Devon Walker-Figueroa as our Virgil, we begin in the collection's eponymous town of Philomath, Oregon. We drift through the general store, into the Nazarene Church, past people plucking at the brambles of a place that won't let them go. We move beyond the town into fields and farmland-and further still, along highways, into a cursed Californian town, a museum in Florence. We wander with a kind of animal logic, like a beast with "e;a mind to get loose / from a valley fallowing / towards foul,"e; through the tense, overlapping space between movement and stillness.An explorer at the edge of the sublime, Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is "e;merely existence carrying on and carrying on."e; In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesn't flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard.For in Philomath, it is the poet's (sometimes reluctant) obligation "e;to keep an eye / on what is left"e; of the people and places that have impacted us. And there is always something left, whether it is the smell of burnt grapes, a twelfth-century bronze, or even a lock of hair.