“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