Devon Walker-Figueroa

“Poems written in blousy, ambitious soliloquies worthy of the Globe. Poems held up on skeletonized traditional forms that retain their elegant histories despite their crumbling. A poem, ‘The Perch,’ in which a mummy of a perch, behind glass, in the Egyptian gallery of a museum, whose fins ‘look like that paper / meat comes wrapped in or pioneers / once covered windows with in place / of glass,’ catches the speaker’s eye, and manages to out-fish Elizabeth Bishop’s fish in its contemplation of the empathic, even erotic dangers of seeing all the way to the bones.

OK, I had to look up ‘speleothems’ in the big dictionary I keep locked up in my ‘sewing room’ because I wanted to ensconce myself in the language of the dizzying sonnet sequence ‘Australopitheca & Starman,’ a sort of translation of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ but this time voiced by Lucy, the unearthed 3.2-million-year-old pre-hominid, ‘a sorceress fashioned from bone,’ whose sonnets are ardently directed toward Starman, the dummy in the driver’s seat of a Tesla that is traveling, directionless, even as we speak, through space. The sonnets are at once literary (‘You’re relineating your maddest scene where no one can / scan it, Rocketman’), decadent, heady, hilarious, and ravishing, which pretty much describes the whole brimming enterprise that is Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Lazarus Species. This book roller coasters us in a life-and-death-defying spiral between fossil and future, extinction and resurrection, heaven and hell. The poems are the suture, or we are.”

—Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets

“Devon Walker-Figueroa’s voice in Lazarus Species tumbles with all the wild order of a waterfall. Water is water until form is the barrel you grip before these poems toss you over the edge and you plunge all gasp and dazzle with the force of a hammer into the pool of her mind. You cannot finish this book and remain unchanged!”

—Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete

“Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Lazarus Species is a suite of linguistic resurrections, equal parts elegy, incantation, and cosmological flirtation. These poems multitask effortlessly—they shimmer with feral grammar, tilt toward silence, and whisper the secrets of language all while performing myth glamorously. With a precise syntax that stammers open new dimensions of sense, Walker-Figueroa wondrously conducts the spectral and the scientific, the peasant and the planetary, the extinct and the exalted into communion.”

—Airea D. Matthew, author of Simulacra and Bread and Circus

“Devon Walker-Figueroa’s poetry has an absolutely Elizabethan exuberance: fluency and fancy, a love of puns and poetic figures, and tireless but never tiresome verbal play. She hides darkness with her light and weight with her lightness. It’s fitting, too, that one of the most electric poems is called 'My Invention,' since inventiveness is this poet’s luminous beeline to creativity. Full of poems that 'light / your whole mind on fire,' Lazarus Species comes to life on the page and in the ear.”

 —Amit Majmudar, author of Three Metamorphoses: Novellas in Prose and Verse

“Humming, whirring, and burning with ghosts, prayer, and grief, Devon Walker-Figueroa’s incandescent Philomath—lit by loss and longing, and radiant with intelligence—is ablaze.”

—Robyn Schiff

“Devon Walker-Figueroa is that rare being—a poet who is both a brilliantly heartrending lyricist and a scathingly precise portraitist; a poet who experiments with the forms of verse, and a natural-born storyteller whose sympathy for the vividly rendered residents of Philomath recalls the Tilbury town of Edwin Arlington Robinson and the Winesburg, Ohio of Sherwood Anderson. This is poetry throwing off sparks with the élan of Ai, Raymond Carver, and Sharon Olds—though Walker-Figueroa is a totally original voice.”

—Joyce Carol Oates

“In Philomath, Devon Walker-Figueroa, with rare insight, writes an America so absolutely American it has been forgotten by America, an America so American one can’t believe it exists unless one has lived there, and if one has lived there one recognizes it everywhere. Walker-Figueroa sees not only beyond our ideas about ourselves, but all the way to us being ourselves. Hers are the truest poems being written.”

—Shane McCrae

“I couldn’t be more delighted than to have found Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath. Philomath is a place, a small town in Kings Valley, Oregon. Here, the neighbor eats locusts and every daughter is blonde. If one of the book’s motives is ‘Find[ing] a way out of this valley named for a family so dead / everyone calls them Kings,’ the means is music. There is a harp, a violin, Gregorian chants, and hymns, but what drew me in was the music of the sentence, of the poetic line. One truly senses a poet trying to hear the world around her, in all of its trouble, complexity and joy. If whatever it means ‘to become’ has a sound, Devon Walker-Figueroa can hear it, ‘the way a blood’s fever can outlast the mind’s.’”

—Sally Keith

“This is ‘the sound of becoming,’ ‘every you also/ a me.’ This is the haunted Northwest, its ‘trespasses/ unwittingly made.’ This is the poet who knows all about ‘a harp with forty strings of gut/ and one of gold,’ who has turned that harp from agony to harmony with the songs of her childhood and teens. These are the steers and the steering and the wrong turns and the turnings of a verse so modern that its reverses point into the future and all the way back past The Mill on the Floss; these are the memories, the parables, ‘the closest/ you can get to civilization out here,’ as if we did not have to civilize ourselves, as if this poet and her music could not take us ‘Out of Body,’ out of the ghost town called Bodie, out of a scary family history, out of martyrdom, out of time. It's a tome against self-erasure, for recollection, for staying and moving on and even thriving where so many have already fallen.”

—Stephanie Burt

“The word philomath suggests a hunger for learning and this debut collection—with its exploration of humanity, nature and the surreal—represents Walker-Figueroa’s passion for storytelling and language, and ignites our own.

As befitting a writer who “grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range,” Walker-Figueroa’s work is powerful, at times mysterious, and a thrilling study of memory, time and events both quotidian and historic. Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, Philomath is sure to be a notable debut.”

—Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books, “Twelve Books of Poetry to Read in 2021”

“The questions posed here are not moralized or truly ever answered. And as much as they are questions about the purpose of grief, they are also questions about why people stay in a place that is hurting them.”

—J. David, Cleveland Review of Books, “Seeing it Everywhere: On Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath”

"I am not typically drawn to poetry—but I fell in love with the cover of Philomath instantly. And then, of course, I had to investigate the pages! Wow . . . such beautiful words. Such anger, sadness, joy, hunger, hope, defeat, and overcoming. I won't even try to explain its basis. Just read this lovely homage to memory and home and the future for yourself, and you'll see what I mean."

—Linda Bond, Auntie's Bookstore

"Devon Walker-Figueroa's Philomath reimagines Kings Valley, OR—where the author grew up, now a ghost town—in all its beauty and discordance." —Library Journal

"These sharply observed poems imbue its portrait of place with wit and electricity." —Publishers Weekly

“There are certain artifacts of art or design that seem immediately correct. A 1970's BMW 2002, a Fender Telecaster, or Thomas Cole landscapes in the mind of a New Englander. All seem at first sight, to even a lay-person's eye: just what that thing is. When I first encountered Devon Walker-Figueroa's collection, Philomath, I felt just that quintessence. I was urged to mumble: Yes, that is poetry. And yes, that's what poetry is meant to do.”

—John Dudek, Associate Director of Creative Writing, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign