Philomath: Poems

(Paperback)

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Winner of the 2022 Levis Reading Prize
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2021 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
Top Ten Pick for Fall 2021 Poetry Titles
Poetry Title to Watch for 2021
Must-Read Book of September 2021

Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.

With Devon Walker-Figueroa as our Virgil, we begin in the collections eponymous town of Philomath, Oregon. We drift through the general store, into the Nazarene Church, past people plucking at the brambles of a place that wont let them go. We move beyond the town into fields and farmlandand further still, along highways, into a cursed Californian town, a museum in Florence. We wander with a kind of animal logic, like a beast with a mind to get loose / from a valley fallowing / towards foul, through the tense, overlapping space between movement and stillness.

An explorer at the edge of the sublime, Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature, of memory, and of a beauty that is merely existence carrying on and carrying on. In her wanderings, she guides readers toward a kind of witness that doesnt flinch from the bleak or bizarre: A vineyard engulfed in flames is reclaimed by the fields. A sow smothers its young, then bears more. A neighbor chews locusts in his yard.

For inPhilomath, it is the poets (sometimes reluctant) obligation to keep an eye / on what is left of the people and places that have impacted us. And there is alwayssomethingleft, whether it is the smell of burnt grapes, a twelfth-century bronze, or even a lock of hair.

Reviews

Winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut from Walker-Figueroa ponders beauty, nature, and the landscape of Philomath, Oregon.Publishers Weekly, Fall 2021 Top Ten Pick for Poetry

Devon Walker-Figueroas Philomath reimagines Kings Valley, ORwhere the author grew up, now a ghost townin all its beauty and discordance.Library Journal

Philomath, Ore., is the setting for this gritty but lyric noir, where locals live and fight against their environment, be it the settled ghost town or the decaying natural world . . . These sharply observed poems imbue its portrait of place with wit and electricity.Publishers Weekly

Walker-Figueroas work is powerful, at times mysterious, and a thrilling study of memory, time and events both quotidian and historic . . . Philomath is sure to be a notable debut.Chicago Review of Books, Twelve Poetry Collections to Read in 2021

Guiding readers from places near as the eponymous Oregon town and far as Florence, Italy, Walker-Figueroas sure hand on her subjects never wavers, forging new paths with a confidence that feels preternatural.Chicago Review of Books, Must-Read Books of September 2021

As with all good place-based writing, Philomath is more than pastoral; it is intensely personal and intimate with its surroundings. Walker-Figueroa demonstrates that a place is more than its ecosystem and infrastructure. More than anything else, it is its people.J. David, Cleveland Review of Books

A narrative coming-of-age poetry collection laced with searing imagery and gut-punch single-line revelations.Portland Mercury

A resounding debut collection. You dont need to have come from a town like Philomath to savor this nuanced book, yet equally, you wont forget Philomath after youve read it, and youll find yourself returning to its pagesto its city limits, to its ghosts, to its magical refrainsrepeatedly.Chicago Review of Books

"Walker-Figueroas project is to plumb the interchange between place and person. Like William Carlos Williamss Paterson, Philomath maps a speaker onto a real place, and, even more, asserts, in Williamss words, that a man himself is a city.Harvard Review

Prior to reading Devon Walker-Figueroas award-winning debut, I accepted the old, familiar adage You cant go home again on the basis of personal experience and without much hesitation. But in the afterglow of Philomaths psalms, cedars, and understudies, Im much more intrigued by the idea that you cant leave home again, especially if home is a haunted, long-forgotten ghost town in the American Northwest, plagued by its own wavering intimacies. These poems are at their most dazzling when theyre slow burning, more anecdotal than allegorical, and are so loyal to the immediacy of their environments that what emerges is both character study and elegy for the provisional.West Branch Review

Author Bio

DevonWalker-Figueroais the author of Philomath, selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Sally Keith. She is a writer, editor, and erstwhile professional ballet dancer who grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the 2018 recipient of the New England Reviews Emerging Writer Award, Walker-Figueroa has published poems in such journals as the American Poetry Review, The Nation, POETRY, Lana Turner, the Harvard Advocate, Ploughshares, and the New England Review. She is currently enrolled in NYUs fiction MFA program, teaches writing courses at Saint Josephs College in Brooklyn, and serves as the co-founding editor of Horsethief Books.