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 collection's 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 won't let them go. We move beyond the town into fields and farmland-and 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 doesn't 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 poet's (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.
About the Author :
Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath, selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Sally Keith. Originally from Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the 2018 recipient of the New England Review's Emerging Writer Award. Her poems have appeared in such publications as The Nation, POETRY, the American Poetry Review, Lana Turner, and Ploughshares.
Review :
“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-Figueroa’s Philomath reimagines King’s Valley, OR—where the author grew up, now a ghost town—in 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-Figueroa’s 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-Figueroa’s 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 don’t need to have come from a town like Philomath to savor this nuanced book, yet equally, you won’t forget Philomath after you’ve read it, and you’ll find yourself returning to its pages—to its city limits, to its ghosts, to its magical refrains—repeatedly.”—Chicago Review of Books
"Walker-Figueroa’s project is to plumb the interchange between place and person. Like William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Philomath maps a speaker onto a real place, and, even more, asserts, in Williams’s words, “that a man himself is a city.”—Harvard Review
“Prior to reading Devon Walker-Figueroa’s award-winning debut, I accepted the old, familiar adage “You can’t go home again” on the basis of personal experience and without much hesitation. But in the afterglow of Philomath’s psalms, cedars, and understudies, I’m much more intrigued by the idea that you can’t 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 they’re 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
