Lazarus Species - by Devon Walker-Figueroa (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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. [. . .] 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

"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. Matthews, author of Bread and Circus