Late to the Search Party: Poems - Softcover

Dawson, Steven Espada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1668081563 ISBN 13: 9781668081563

Publisher: Scribner, 2025

Synopsis

A raw, crystalline debut poetry collection exploring themes of family, addiction, belonging, and loss—a searching elegy of the fissures that have come to define contemporary American life.

The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, family, and grief in poems about his own half-immigrant Mexican American family: his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father.

Chronicled in four parts, shifting restlessly between childhood memories, the sudden disappearance of his brother, and the inevitable loss of his ailing mother, Late to the Search Party explores what it means to be a family of one—to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance. In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what remains: the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness—and the affection and humor that makes itself felt in spite of everything.

A vivid and thoughtful meditation on love and loss, Late to the Search Party is an ode to the families that inspire and confound us all.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he is a former Ruth Lilly Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. His poems appear in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance. He has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the country. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When the Body Says No but You Can’t Stop Swallowing WHEN THE BODY SAYS NO BUT YOU CAN’T STOP SWALLOWING
after “On Being Suicidal” by b: william bearhart

From twenty yards away the adult megaplexxx sign

looks like a crescent moon stuck on its beetle back.

On the bus I use my fingernail to etch figure eights

into a Styrofoam cup. The mean idea of vanishing

myself is a seed I can’t unplant. A stranger tells me

her kidney stones ache. Every flaw in the road

rattles her like a handful of glass. I pine for

that gorgeous myth of childhood. How I lost

good sleep worrying over watermelon seeds.

Thought they’d gut sprout, impale upward, straight

through God’s windshield. The thought of being

dead returns unwelcome as a landlord.

In Colorado I pushed two motel beds together,

left the door wide open. Anything to be held

while unrecognizable. Regarding wellness

checks: I cut into a forearm length of bread,

finessed the knife like a violin bow. I tried

to convince that angry cop I never swallowed,

then threw up in his back seat. Had instead

he been my father opening, for me, a door—

not out but toward somewhere tender. Had he

held me there, so I might practice delight.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1668081563
• ISBN 13: 9781668081563
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96