Lazarus Species - Paperback

by Devon Walker-Figueroa (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Devon Walker-Figueroa grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range, and received her education from Chemeketa Community College, Cornell University, Bennington College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and New York University, where she was the Jill Davis Fellow in fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Zyzzyva, and her debut collection of poems, Philomath, was selected by Sally Keith for the National Poetry Series, won the Levis Reading Prize, and was the first collection of poems to be a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Walker-Figueroa has worked as a professional ballet and modern dancer, research assistant, classical harpist, bartender, literary editor, and creative writing instructor and is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.