Devon Walker-Figueroa’s sophomore outing, Lazarus Species, is a deeply-contemplated, ambitious octopus of a collection. At its core is Walker-Figueroa’s signature curiosity and her playful and illuminating skill with language and form. From that emanate poems engaged with topics such as ecopoetics, seemingly extinct species (the Lazarus of the title), David Bowie, our earliest ancestors, and yes, Jack Dempsey.
Our conversation is equally broad, aloft in the clouds and rooted into the earth.
Mandana Chaffa
Given the success of Philomath, considering Lazarus Species in comparison reflects a difference in focus. Philomath was rooted in a central location that rippled out into the world. Lazarus Species engages with the entire world—all of nature—and even time itself. Would you talk about these lenses?
Devon Walker-Figueroa
First of all, thank you for your astute reading of how place works in Philomath. Certainly the geography, industries, and inhabitants of Philomath and its surrounding valleys are, to my restless mind, unfixed and irreducible: They wander, as if of their own volition, into obscure territories of memory, experience, and the world. That central location does, as you say, ripple out.
As for Lazarus Species, although its apparent ambit is larger and, by virtue of that, less focused, more drifting, I wrote a significant portion of it concurrently with Philomath. All of the ghazals, for example, as well as “Glossolaliac,” “Citadel,” and the villanelle- and pantoum-derived poems were written before Philomath was picked up for publication. All to say, I enjoyed bouncing back and forth between the two projects, such that as soon as I lost momentum with one, I could leap to the other—and vice versa. The two books gave me the chance to find my own alternating current, if you will.
As for the treatment of time, I think of time as part of the poetic medium. You can speed it up and slow it down through careful arrangement of sounds, silences, spaces. Think of it as a space-silence continuum on the page. When I’m trying to decide how long a caesura should be, for example, I approach it as a unit of distance. When I was younger and composing songs on the harp, or looking at symphony scores to come up with a harp accompaniment, I used a lot of rests of different values—half, whole, quarter, dotted whole, etc. It’s similar with poetry, only mercifully there is never a metronome ticking in the background. If you want to set the proverbial time signature, you would do that through mood and meter in conjunction, and yet always you must defer to reader’s interpretation of the dynamics that you indicate. The reader needs that freedom to make meaningful and memorable (even if unpleasant) choices, and ideally a line could give way to a variety of interpretations and moods, such that time and repetition do not degrade the experience of that line but rather flesh it out over the course of years.
There is also so much to say about the lens of nature! My sister and I were raised in the woods of Oregon’s coastal mountains, surrounded by the rarity and wonder of old growth trees. Imagine a Douglas fir that takes seven grown men at full wingspan to encircle it. Those were the kinds of beings in whose perpetual shade we were fortunate enough to live and to first encounter the world. The memory of those doug firs and oaks is that of a past world that will not exist again in my lifetime. I mourn it. And I am lucky to have known it at all. Many don’t get the chance to exist in proximity to such grandeur nor the luxury even of mourning its disappearance. A question that accompanies me like my own pulse is, what do those trees mean now that their lives have ended? Now that their forms have been carved and compressed and varnished into “usefulness”—into beams, floors, furnishings, even pulp?
Mandana Chaffa
You’ve traveled extensively over the last several years. How do those experiences color these poems, or more broadly, the topics that challenge your attention? There’s something about being a stranger in a strange land that strips one of preconceived notions of the self, of the masks we might wear in our quotidian lives. (And perhaps a hint of The Man Who Fell to Earth, which plays a role in this collection.)
Devon Walker-Figueroa
I love that you say “challenge” attention. That is the right verb for it, no doubt. Like many people, my attention is apt to wander unless it is challenged (especially these days, when so many of the digital platforms mediating our communication and attention profit from the degradation and discontinuity of both). This is why I tend to gravitate toward activities that require a lot of effort and a certain complexity with regard to technique—because I need the challenge to be inexhaustible. I need the activity to demand everything from me. Ballet. Harp. Poetry. These are the primary areas of artistic expression and inquiry that feel infinitely complex and challenging to me. They demand my devotion by holding my attention.
And yes, thanks to the Amy Lowell Trust’s generous scholarship, I’ve been fortunate to travel to a variety of difficult-to-reach places I could not have otherwise afforded to go. Mostly, my travels were centered around sites of former resource extraction, places where towns (not unlike the ghost town I grew up in) popped up around some valuable “raw material,” and which, once said material store was exhausted or no longer in demand, dried up.
There are of course places all over the face of the earth that are pocked and scarred by our extractive activities, and which, once left alone, might begin to heal in some way, whether ecologically, culturally, or otherwise. I wanted to see what this looked like in different environments. Maybe I wanted these landscapes to prove that recovery from such damage was possible. So I spent time wandering around former diamond mines and “white gold” (guano) islands in and off the southern coasts of Africa; visited the toxic industrial ruins in Estonia that served as filming locations for Tarkovsky’s Stalker; ventured into the hot breath of the Peruvian Amazon to experience firsthand the wilderness but also the encroachment of papaya farms, mining, and other industries into that wilderness.
Certainly the time in Egypt and Namibia, in particular, had a profound effect on Lazarus Species, particularly the intimate sense of the desert and, of course, the muse of “The Perch” and “Desert Theater.” I’m of course deeply grateful for that experience, even while feeling ambivalent about global travel as a pursuit, particularly because of its class and ecological implications and the fact that it was something my mother would have loved to do but never got the chance to. So there was, no doubt, an element of survivor’s guilt wrapped up in that freedom of movement.
Beyond the dislocation that travel has brought, I also experienced a lot of social and cultural dislocation early on in my life. As you know, my parents pulled my sister and me out of regular school to homeschool us when I was six. We started farming and raising our own food, even making our own soap and candles. We were homesteaders of a kind, which is not so unusual in itself. Not in Oregon, anyhow. But what made our lifestyle change such a jolt was its context. Our disappearance from society was less an inspired assertion of self-reliance than an instinct to run and hide from an ongoing stalking situation.
Mandana Chaffa
Lazarus species—those thought to be extinct but aren’t, that “come back” into our view—were new to me. In the title poem you write “how small the risk of eternity, / how great the risk of not being reached for.” Perhaps it’s a sign of our times that I thought less about rising from the dead and more about being hidden from view, and how safe that might be; as if one leaves social media entirely, and exists without the impact of a global, intrusive eye. Speaking of view: whether or not we know they are there, those species exist.
Devon Walker-Figueroa
The arboreal chinchilla rat was thought to be extinct, was believed to have been hunted out of existence because of the human appetite for its soft and insulative pelt, but then, lo and behold, this tenacious rodent was spotted near Machu Picchu in 2009. All to say, this creature’s ability to hide, to effectively track as extinct to humans, may well have saved it from extinction. There are other versions of how the lazarus effect, as it’s also called, plays out. But certainly one of the things that consistently intrigues me is just what you mention, this being dead versus seeming to be dead or even suffering what might be termed social death or extreme obscurity. There are a good many philosophers who’ve written on perception’s role in reality. Does human perception confer reality on material objects? Or is their reality independent from any perception of them? Does divine perception confer reality on humans? Are we real if no one but us perceives our existence? And what if there are lapses in that perception? Is that table real when everyone leaves the room?
The question of obscurity and social death that a lazarus species invites one to consider also fascinates me. Art, perhaps unlike reality, does crave a perceiver. The poem only exists when you think to read it, to recite it, etc. Otherwise it is paper and ink, sure, but poetry? Maybe not. Should we still call it a volcano when it sleeps? Or just a mountain? And yet, that chinchilla rat was surely alive, leading an active if furtive life, for all those years when we presumed it gone forever. As The Boss sings in “Atlantic City,” “maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”
Mandana Chaffa
And of course, Lazarus is also a David Bowie musical (featuring his music and a book by Enda Walsh) which I had the good fortune to see about a decade ago off-Broadway. Were you a fan of The Man Who Fell to Earth? It plays quite a role in “Australopitheca & Starman,” including the reverse countdown of “Space Oddity.”
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Certainly, that influence is strong. Bowie always seemed to me someone who had a great abundance of what Keats called negative capability. He was at unusual ease with complexity and mystery and indeterminacy. The elasticity of his aesthetics reflected this, as did his androgyny, and the way subtlety and drama were not mutually exclusive in his work. This might sound strange, but I always had this notion, when I was young, that I would just one day see him on the streets of New York. Magical thinking, of course. It never happened. But I was devastated when he died, and for several days (if not weeks) refused to believe it was true.
Mandana Chaffa
In addition to connecting Starman with our ancestor Lucy (“fossils into the future”), you engage in a great deal of free-form temporality, unlacing past from present from what is yet to be, what may never be. Or as you write in “C. Elegans” “A neurosurgeon tells me, the present is only the remembered present, / and daylight is just the god-of-eight-minutes-ago. I take his word as present.”
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Oh, I love that phrase you have there, “unlacing past from present from what is yet to be, what may never be.” I think all lyric poets probably experience this … the sensation of all time occurring at once and, therefore, in a meaningful way, not occurring at all. I think there is a fair amount of that experience to be had throughout the book. But I will leave that up to the readers to decide.
Stretching English in its adolescence to its current state (which I don’t have the courage to call maturity) and even into a speculative future is a project I enjoy, not only because I want to see at what point it breaks down, but also because I assume everything we are writing in this moment will be indecipherable sooner than we’d like to believe.
Call it selfish karma-courting, but maybe, just maybe, if we care for those who came so long before us, and we trouble ourselves to re-animate their work and the now “dead” language in which it lived, maybe people far in the future will afford us a similar generosity.
Though of course, that’s likely folly. Since English, given the increase in its number of speakers, its global distribution, the extremity of its mediation-via-tech, etc. will change differently and likely more rapidly than in prior eras. And, of course, the sustained widespread usage of English is also not something one should assume. Or necessarily even hope for. It just happens to be the only language in which I can write more complex poetry and whose past lives remain legible to me.
Mandana Chaffa
There’s a glorious span of long-form poems across these pages, some of them snaking down deeply, the way one might sink to an ocean bottom. What were some of the visual inspirations that led these explorations, that provided the foundation of this kind of verbal architecture?
Devon Walker-Figueroa
What a beautiful description of motion. I hope there are others who experience those movements as you do.
So many inspirations … one image I come back to, which I encountered while climbing an enormous dune in Namibia, was the sand’s motion in the wind, the lines that were perpetually rewriting themselves in its surface and which I, by trodding up the dune, intruded upon. My footsteps were a disruption of the pattern. Weird craters trailed behind me. The other image, rhyming with this in a way, was what appeared to be little couplets of some inscrutable script etched into the sand. So tiny you couldn’t read a word. At one point, I met one of their authors. A small scarab, skittering rapidly over the surface, and then it was gone. Whether it flew or plunged under the surface, I’ll never know. The whole climb, sand floated and glinted constantly in the wind. It was so beautiful and soothing until its particles got in your eyes.
Mandana Chaffa
“The Euthanasia Coaster,” seven loops of a rollercoaster leading to death, is a kind of “septina,” yes? I thought that extra stanza might be a play on the seven ages of man, or perhaps T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is referred to in a subsequent poem.
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Right and right. All of that is certainly there. And thank you for noticing it! The other thing that I did was elongate the spirals by re-organizing the end words a bit. The Euthanasia Coaster is a death spiral within a death spiral. Incidentally, the designer of the actual euthanasia coaster, a Romanian engineer and conceptual artist named Julijonas Urbonas, notes that the passenger would die of hypoxia on the third loop, and that the additional four loops are for aesthetics.
Mandana Chaffa
I fell down the rabbit hole of the differences between Early Modern and Middle English as you employ the former in some of your work. It’s unnerving how a language one knows so well starts to become difficult to recognize, and then, impossible to read altogether. It almost felt as much anthropological as linguistic. Would you talk about this?
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Yes, it is unnerving. Especially when we are working in a tradition that foregrounds duration. Poems really do seem to want to live forever, to be immortal, even when they pretend they want otherwise. Even those poems most devoted to the aesthetics of ephemerality generally leverage that devotion to somehow defy human forgetfulness.
On the note of anthropology and linguistics, I think I have instincts in that direction, even if I lack training in them. My love of earlier versions of English began when I was pretty young because my mother would read the Canterbury Tales to my sister and me in the original Middle English. She was an amateur folklorist and a total English grammar nut, in the most charming way possible. Also, the book my parents used in order to teach me to read was the King James Version Bible, not the new and adapted version either, but the antique-sounding one. So “antiquated” diction and syntax ended up feeling natural to me, even if it made my spoken English sound less natural or less modern, in any case. If I had another couple of lifetimes on this earth, I don’t doubt I’d devote one of them to linguistics and another to archeology.
Mandana Chaffa
The Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao te Ching has the lines: “Things arise and she lets them come; / things disappear and she lets them go. / She has but doesn’t possess, / acts but doesn’t expect. / When her work is done, she forgets it. / That is why it lasts forever.” The terrific “Glossolaliac” has its own Zen moments, with “I am / stories half-told like the rest of us. / We are stories half-told / like the rest of me. / I revise the future, throw a discus / like a die, and wash my hands.” There’s a non-denominational, multitudinal theology or perhaps an overarching eco-theology throughout Lazarus Species.
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Wow. I love those lines, especially the last two. There’s a deep and stunning truth in that—the way people write in order to forget, not just to remember. And the writer’s desire to forget what they write down may add, in the end, to its durability in human memory. Of course, these things are not mutually exclusive. One might wish terribly to preserve something, to know it will be remembered by someone, and meanwhile wish equally terribly not to be that someone.
To your question about multitudinal theology or eco-theology. Certainly that’s a part of the book. “Glossolaliac” is addressed in large part to the Sumerian god, Enlil. “The Perch” draws heavily on Egyptian religious mythology. “My Madness Is My Love Toward Mankind” is written in the diction and syntax of Vaslav Nijinsky, who believed, at times throughout his “madness,” that he was God. “Scrap” references Theodoric the Great, who banned boxing because it defiled the image of God as represented in the human face. All these and many other instances reinforce your interpretation.
I’m also inherently an animist. As a kid, I thought everything had a soul, not just animals and elements, but furniture and even board games. Those emotions/senses still live in me now, though I also don’t go around collecting magical rocks or placing deep credence in the zodiac either. Intuition. Superstition. I think both have their place and mingle fairly readily at times.
Mandana Chaffa
Would you talk about topical and linguistic accumulations, especially with the longer poems? Even though I’m a purist when it comes to defiling books, I almost wanted to cut the poems into pieces and color code the various connections and frictions. Which is obsessive on my part, certainly, but it’s equally a response to your voracious curiosity, if I may call it that. This is polyphonia as a way of delving deeply, to archaeologize, perhaps even to obfuscate?
Devon Walker-Figueroa
That’s a fascinating way to think of it. The voices as layers to be excavated through. That feels so apt, especially with regards to “Citadel,” which manages to reveal through a kind of burial process. Truly, I buried myself for months in the writings of T.E. Lawrence in order to write that. And in learning about both what he went through and what he did for and to others, I could kind of hold the prism of his life up to the light and see so many other lives glinting in it, including my own, and the parts of my own life which I least wanted to examine. And so those got reduced to footnotes, and the font got smaller, just as in his own journals and letters, his script diminishes in size when he is ashamed of what the words add up to.
Mandana Chaffa
A subject I never thought I’d talk about with you, let alone poetically: let’s talk boxing, and “Scrap.” I grew up watching boxing on television—that era of Muhammed Ali (boxer/poet), Joe Frazier, George Foreman—and I was especially taken with this poem’s almost Shakespearean scope. Your tremendous knowledge of Jack Dempsey and boxing in general was unexpected and fascinating, though it does fit so well into this collection of epic contemplations.
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Yes, let’s talk about boxing! You know, I would actually love to write a poem for Muhammed Ali at some point, and thought about doing so in this book, but there was this weird name connection to Jack, through my mother and her father, that I hoped to work out in some way. So Dempsey it was, for this book at least. And he proved to be quite a fascinating person to get to know through his writings. All of the lively idiomatic speech. You can really hear his voice rise up from the page. It’s kind of amazing how interesting he manages to make a simple guide to “explosive” punching.
One thing that was really fun about writing scrap was that each “round” was a rondeau, and so I had the great good challenge of merging that strict form, compact and disciplined as a boxer itself, with Dempsey’s super lively and idiosyncratic speech. Boxing is an ancient sport, too, and although I flinch whenever I see a head take a hit, because I’m so protective of the brain, most soulful of organs, I also really admire the way the high stakes sharpen the fighter’s attention and resolve. It’s not just about force, but the ability to read the other’s body accurately, and, of course, the talent of evasion and deflection as well.
I initially wrote this poem while living in Brooklyn, but it came to life for me in a new way when I was in Greece two years later, where I got to see ancient depictions of men wrestling and boxing. Once again, I found myself mesmerized. This time not by old black and white reels or a delightfully voicey instructional manual, but by stern-eyed bronze Minoans frozen mid-round in a perpetual exchange of blows that actually resembled, from my vantage, a kind of tender embrace.
Mandana Chaffa
Referring back to your poem “Optimal Stopping,” both with the long-form poems as well as the collection as a whole, how did you determine the optimal point of releasing the pen, turning the page, ending the process? Stopping not as completion, but as a resting place, perhaps?
Devon Walker-Figueroa
Oh gosh, this is hard to answer. I think when the collection had taken everything from me that it could. When I had no more poems to offer it. No more lines. No shifted commas or spaces. When I was no longer capable of dwelling in its pages and seeing them with any clarity. This collection exhausted me at times, but in an exhilarating way. I hope to be able to see it clearly again at some point, but right now is not that moment. On which note, reading your perspective on the book here is such a gift. Even if the book is a bit out of focus to me right now, your questions here make me feel better in touch with the possibilities these poems might offer readers now that it’s available to them.
The last thing I’ll say is that, earlier this year, I started to feel my poems migrate in concern and tone toward something else, something new to me and as yet nebulous. That was also a kind of sign that my work here on Lazarus Species was coming to a close. Now it belongs to everyone else, and I welcome that chapter of its life.
POETRY
Lazarus Species
By Devon Walker-Figueroa
Published by Milkweed Editions
November 18, 2025
