DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA

When we were emailing to set up this discussion, we talked about the show Hot Ones, which you said you were a big fan of, so I thought, “Why not start with a Hot Ones-inspired question?” They often dig up pictures from social media for their guest to respond to, so I wanted to ask you about a photograph that I found on your personal website the other day. On your About Page, there’s this really great image of you in formal attire—this dapper dark gray jacket, slacks, suede shoes, and you’ve climbed a tree, and wedged your body between these two thick branches. With your arms behind you on one branch and your legs lunging on the other, it almost looks like you’re trying to walk vertically up it. On one hand, you’re awkwardly placed in an impractical outfit, but on the other, you look perfectly focused and balanced where you are. In a way, it was a lot like what I’ve come to expect from your poems; you achieve these wild formal and linguistic feats, but with a gracefulness and ease that defies their difficulty. Can you tell me how that photo came to be?

Well, that’s a very nice description. And I like your application of it to my poetry. I will say climbing a tree in a suit is more difficult than just climbing a tree.

I would think so.

That photograph was taken in an old cemetery in Philadelphia. So it’s probably not very reverent to be climbing trees when in the presence of the dead. But you know, if I were dead, I’d be like, “go for it.”

Yeah, I feel like it’s a celebration of life that the dead can get behind.

But am I wrong to read into it so much? Like, is there a metaphor embedded in this image?

I mean, really, it was out of impulse, but it’s funny you should say that, because when I got the image back from the photographer, David McDowell, I noticed that the positioning of my legs was inverting what the tree was doing. I was weirdly composed with the tree. I don’t know if I just subconsciously did that.

I’m a little bit hyperactive. I grew up on a farm, and I’ve climbed a lot of trees in my life. I also used to be a professional ballet dancer, and I like to move around a lot. Even when I’m in my house reading, sometimes I’ll be walking around with the book instead of sitting in a chair. That was just me being my kinetic self. And I’d dressed up all nice with the intention of behaving properly, and it just didn’t work out that way.

Speaking of this need to move, in an interview with Mandana Chaffa for The Chicago Review of Books, you said that, for the most part, you worked on your first two collections, Philomath and Lazarus Species, concurrently, jumping from one manuscript to the other when your writing felt stagnant or like it was losing momentum. I relate to this as someone who easily goes stir crazy and is constantly shuffling between projects. Could you talk about what effect this writing process might have had on Lazarus Species?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think I needed to get away from one project and then the other, even before I knew they were individual projects. I’d written poems from them, thinking that I could make them all live in the same book, and that sounded very, as you can imagine, chaotic. 

That would have been a very chill 300-page poetry book. 

Well, yeah, and in the beginning of working on them, maybe I had 20 pages in one mode and 10 pages in another, and I’m trying to fit them together, and they were like oil and water. I think it was my husband, Justin Boening, who first said, “You’ve got this one mode that’s like your hometown poems, why don't you write some more of those? And then you have these other poems, and you can see what happens with them too, but maybe they don’t want to live in the same book.” And they did not.

I’m a restless person, so there’s that. I’d run out of what I could do in one mode, and I’d still want to work, but I couldn’t work in that mode, and so then I’d jump off to the other. I do think of Philomath as being more devoted to narrative. 

Yeah, I could see that.

This new collection, Lazarus Species, is still interested in narrative, but it’s more devoted to the lyric mode. It’s more music mad in some places. I think of  “Glossolaliac” being in that mode. And “Ameliorates,” where it’s like, “Wait… say what?”

No, I love “Ameliorates,” that’s one of my favorite poems in the collection. It’s very frenetic, but also it feels like a scientific poem, where you have this word as the title, and it mutates into different anagrammatic forms, and then you have that final line that suggests a continuance with “more material,” and all these associations with motherhood. I like that sense of generational change and recombination that was happening there.

Thank you. Yeah, it’s like finding all the ways you can branch out from the word “ameliorates,” and there is something generative about that that fits with the máter, if you will. Well, I’m glad that the music mad parts sing for you.

Yeah, the music mad is why I come to poetry, so I was glad to see so much of it.

But to go back to your first collection, which took its name from a town, Philomath, that is right by where you grew up in Kings Valley. In it, you point out that the town’s name comes from the Greek “philomath,” which means “lover of learning.” And you seem to be, in both your life and poetry collections, someone who does love learning, who’s curious about all the world has to offer, and unafraid to delve into science, literature, sports, music, to travel from ghost towns to urban centers. You’ve also studied in many different places: Cornell, Bennington College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, among others. Can you talk a bit about your experience in these institutions and how they shaped or helped hone your poetic voice?

I’m wary of saying the institutions as much as individual teachers. When I went to Cornell, I’d never studied in such a rigorous academic environment as that before, where you needed to pull all-nighters. It was a challenge to go from community college to that. I was predominantly homeschooled. I did attend schools in Philomath, periodically in Corvallis and Independence, Oregon, but on again, off again. My sister and I were both homeschooled for the most part, and then I left home when I was 15 to do dance stuff professionally until I was 20.  I ended up having a bit of an unconventional education in that regard. Solitude and reading on my own were a huge part of my education as a homeschool student. Working in ballet was really formative for me at an institution like the Houston Ballet.

Yeah, that’s really incredible that you did that on your own.

Also, Kirov Ballet Academy in D.C., which doesn’t exist anymore, but it was the American branch of the Russian school. So all of that was formative, too. And so was Chemeketa, the community college I went to. The longest poem in Philomath, “Beginning Wax to Bronze at Chemeketa Community College,” is set at that school in a sculpture class that I actually took.

Yeah.

And it’s pretty close to reality. The parts that I didn’t include in that poem were even stranger. The fact that there were chickens roaming around in the room, because  someone had a farm, and they were like, “Oh, I was transporting my chickens, I didn’t want to leave them in my car, so I’ll just bring them in.” 

That is crazy. So someone really did have a plaster pregnancy outline that they were sculpting!

 Yeah. And yeah, someone really did try to make a bong, too. I don’t know if they actually ended up casting it or not. But let’s hope they didn’t smoke out of it in any case. As far as the institutions, the individual teachers were really major for me. I had an advisor at Cornell, Michael Cook, who was also the editor of Epoch there for many years, and he was the first person who told me, “You could do this professionally, this writing thing, have you thought about working professionally?” I had taken a short story class with him. So my beginning was in fiction. 

It was when I started working as an intern at Tin House that I got more into poetry. No one else wanted to read poetry submissions, so I would read all the slush. 

I feel like a lot of people get into poetry that way. It’s like, “We’ve got a reader opening at the magazine. No one wants to go through the slush. Why don’t you?”

Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. And I was like, “Yes, this is great!” You learn a lot even from the stuff that you yourself wouldn’t publish. 

Exactly. Yeah.

And you also notice what’s in the water. You’re like, why are so many people writing about this or that. It seemingly has nothing to do with anything in the news, but there’ll just be these shared fascinations. 

Yeah, that’s true. Or you’ll see peculiar words that pop up a lot, where it’s like, why am I seeing “shards” again? Like this word that feels very poetic, but maybe too poetic, that everyone uses.

Right? It’s like, why am I seeing the word “midrib” all the time? The first 3 times, I’m like, “okay,” and then I’m like, “what?”

Yeah. “Palimpsest,” too. Everyone’s got a “palimpsest” poem somewhere!

Stop!

I’d like to talk more about the references in your new collection, Lazarus Species. Whereas Philomath is tethered to a particular place that evokes, in its speaker, memories, feelings, and an entire social economy, Lazarus Species seems to radiate out of literature and archives and second-hand experiences, its poems responding to a fossilized perch displayed in a museum, Philip Sidney’s famed sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, an artist’s imagined lethal roller coaster design, among many other farflung referents. This emphasis on intertextual discourse and language’s ability to defy time and space is especially apparent in your countdown-in-sonnet-sequence “Australopithica & Starman.” Sounding like a malaprop of Sidney’s sequence, your version swaps out the title characters and gender roles by taking on the perspective of a humanoid fossil named Lucy, who is writing to a test dummy named Starman that has ventured outside of Earth’s atmosphere in a Tesla Roadster. Can you talk about what made these characters a fun way to riff off of Sidney’s sequence?

I just have to say that I wrote that poem long before the era of DOGE. Just putting that out there. 

So you didn’t mean to feed into the discourse around Musk and DOGE?

No, I mean, it didn’t exist yet. I graduated from Iowa in 2017. I wrote that around 2019.

Alright, so he’s still alright back then. He’s like this cool bro making electric vehicles who occasionally says outlandish things.

Yeah, the idea of launching the Starman in the Tesla Roadster into space caught my imagination. So I wrote it right after that happened, and it brought Philip Sidney to mind. It brought Astrophil and Stella to mind, because I was thinking about how “Star Lover,” which is what the Latin “Astrophil” translates into, is speaking to a beloved who is heavenly and stellar. I was like, “What if I made her earthen? And what if I told it from her point of view?” She’s earthen, and that’s the most earthen thing I can think of, this fossil that’s buried in the earth. 

Yeah, literally lodged in the ground.

You know, we had the confessionals come along, and they’re wonderful poets, but there was an automatic assumption, and we still run into it a lot after them, that everything a poet writes is confession, and it comes out of their life and their immediate experience. My first book might be seen as fitting that model. That’s why I wanted to write something that didn’t totally ignore reality, but that also had the freedom to depart from it.

Do you think that derived from the process of switching manuscripts? Like, I need to take a break from Philomath, and maybe remove myself from the poems a little bit?

Yeah, maybe I want to go to outer space, instead of being in Philomath today. 

I love that, yeah.

I don’t know if you ever had these kinds of thoughts when you were a kid. You don’t really know what’s fully possible and impossible. I mean, I still don’t, but I remember thinking, because I grew up watching Star Trek, and I was like, “Oh gosh, I’m going to go to space. That’s gonna be really hard, going to space.”

Haha, you’re like, what am I gonna pack? What VHS’s am I gonna bring with me?

Yeah, and it’s gonna unnerve me. I’m gonna be afraid, but I’m gonna need to do it. I just thought everybody would be going to space, and who knows? Maybe we’ll get farmed out to Mars. We never know if Mr. Musk gets his way. Then they can tax us on oxygen and stuff, you know? Great. 

But doesn’t Starman seem like the most Musk thing to do? You have this dummy just mindlessly jettisoned out into space, and we’ll see where it lands. 

It does, and it’s super reckless, right? Because this thing wasn’t even put through sanitation standards. So it’s like, whatever microbes are on it that could be absolutely catastrophic to some other planet’s life forms, small as they might be. Let’s just hope it doesn’t run into anything for a long time that it could impact adversely.

But yeah, I think writing that was a way to reengage with Sir Philip Sidney, for one thing, whose poetry I really love. He plays by the rules, but then he bends the rules. He makes up his own, and he was a sort of formal rebel. So there’s also this sense of traveling into the unknown formally in a poem that rhymes with Starman’s Odyssey. And that was exciting to me, too, how those things interplayed.

In terms of coming up with him, though, as the address. At first, I was like, “maybe she’s just talking to some personified star or something,” and then I was like, “no, this payload, this payload that is shaped like a person is perfect. This is it!” And then it just took off from there.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it also makes sense to me that you’re taking on the muse’s perspective in this one, because Sidney toys with that idea. He has, at the end of “Astrophil and Stella 1,” this moment where his muse gets fed up with his ambivalence and says, “Look in thy heart, and write.” So I like the commandeering of the desiring voice and taking it over from a female perspective.

Thank you. And I mean, he’s talking about her most of the time, but there are those subtle interjections. I like to think that, in all of his praisings of her, he’d want her to eavesdrop or listen in at the very least. Maybe there’s an implied double audience there, but yeah, I had a lot of fun rereading all of that alongside while writing it. That’s so much of the experience of writing is reading. Having that stack of books by your side, these voices you take with you when you’re coming up with your own.

I think that’s what’s great about the experience of reading your book: you get this love of reading that spans the literary output of Jack Dempsey to T.E. Lawrence to Shakespeare. I find that convergence is really fun to dig through.

I also want to talk a bit about your use of traditional forms in the collection. In your sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and even in poems that use form quite loosely, there is a sense of precision and syntactical adeptness that is ever-present. For instance, I was taken by “The Euthanasia Coaster,” a septet sestina that uses its endword repetition to embody the recurrent structures and breakneck twists of a roller coaster. As is true of poetry itself, the thrill of this deadly coaster is how the form affects the psychic interior, how the “loops / will erase the faces though. They will numb the memory and toes.” To add to this numbing effect, your use of “gravitational” and “euthanasia” as multi-syllabled endwords gives the poem a heaviness, reminding the reader that no matter where they’re taken, they can’t escape the physics of gravity and mortality. Did you know early on in the writing process that this poem had to take a sestina form?

Oh, yeah, I set out to write a sestina. That would be most unfortunate to get far along and realize, like, “oh, I’m going to have to re-engineer this into a sestina.”

Haha, true.

But it’s so bold to have those words “gravitational” and “euthanasia” as repeated endwords in a sestina. You’re crazy for doing that!

 Thank you. Yeah, I mean, “euthanasia” is a tough one. I love your comment that kind of establishes the relation between gravity and gravitas. Maybe that was happening at a subconscious level, but I love that you noticed it. As far as making that poem goes, I was inspired by Julijonas Urbonas, who, I want to say it was like his thesis, his college thesis, engineered Euthanasia Coaster, and made a mock-up of it. And you know, he did the math and figured out how to induce hypoxia, so it would really work.

That is wild.

He literally designed the physics of this coaster. He did, and he wrote very compellingly about it, too, and the mock-up ended up spending some time in the MoMA. I’ve never seen it, but I reached out to the guy when the poem got picked up by the Iowa Review and asked him if I could use one of the images of it. The poem states correctly that, if it were to be made, it would kill you by the third loop, so the rest he has in there just for aesthetics. He just liked the idea of having seven loops. I don’t know if that’s like a shout-out to Dante or what. But yeah, I ended up reordering the end words. So they loop, but they don’t spiral in the same way. It has seven loops in it, but they’re a bit bigger and less coiled than the traditional sestina loop. And then, of course, there’s the additional line. So they’re like a septina.

That’s true.

I end up using “euthanasia” in seven or eight different ways, because you have the envoi at the end, too. And I think I use it more than that because it pops up in other lines. It’s truly a lesson in obsession, writing in that form.

Yeah.

When I teach undergrads, I have a section in my Intro to Poetry class, which is on obsessive forms, and the sestina generally gets included.

That’s gotta be challenging for new poets. There’s this really great thing that I think I saw in one of Theodore Roethke’s craft books, where he talks about kind of hazing his students by giving them these insanely complicated forms to write in. So it’s like you’ve got to use the word “deer” seven times and have endwords that recur, but also the first word has to be the same as the last word of the poem. It’s actually really interesting to think of, like, “well, what happens when you try to write in this insane structure?”

Yeah, that’s delightfully crazed. I would have loved that as a student. I always found that the teachers who were most intense and had the most deranged level of specificity in their prompts got the most out of me, and I sometimes do that too for my students. And again, you just get more surprising results. It gives them something to push against, almost like a container out of which they can burst.

Your title, Lazarus Species, refers to an animal that is thought to be extinct, but turns out to have sneakily stuck around. In your collection, this idea resonates in many ways—there are resurrections, rediscoveries, recurrent forms. There are ways in which the speaker is a Lazarus species, having found herself in the lives of different historical figures. It’s interesting that, in a sense, it’s a hopeful term; it’s a new chance at life, but, as your book seems to suggest, there may be a danger to being found out. What was it that made this term a glue to hold your collection together? And do you see it as an optimistic term or something more complex?

Oh, that’s a really interesting question. I love that you call the speaker a kind of Lazarus species, too. The way you described that is so intriguing.

Yeah, just in the way she finds these little tidbits of her life that connect with Dempsey or Lawrence. And I love the way it’s done through the footnotes. Because it really shocks you when you’re like, “Oh, that’s the personal insight into the poem.”

Yeah, I mean, I was really interested in tracing my impulses. I become so fascinated by these people and their voices, and then I have to ask myself, “Well, what does that originate from? Does it always come back to self-interest?” I hate to think of us as being only interested in things that we share some commonality with. But of course, we share commonality with any human being. The first stage is just like, “Oh, this person’s voice.” I remember reading T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom; his descriptions of food are amazing, and then his vivid descriptions of war, and so there are these extremes of pleasure and pain that he treats with the same intensity, but has different tones for.

He often goes without food and water for a longer period of time than you would think. He’s a little bit of a masochist, which intrigued me. I started doing more reading about him, reading his letters, and ended up reading thousands of pages of writing by him and about him.

Wow.

And I found that part of the reason I was so drawn to his story was that I experienced child abuse, and so did he, but I had no idea that was something that maybe connected our minds in some way. It suggested why his mind made so much sense to me. Then again, there are many things at play, his relationship to literature, but also that, and so I just really dove deep, and wrote a letter to him that’s also in a sestina form. You don’t notice it because the lines are landscape, they’re so long that by the time you get to the end of the line, you might not really register the repeated words.

Yeah, I didn’t even notice that.

Yeah, I like that you don’t hear that repetition in the same way. It gets effaced, like the way the desert effaces things. So I remember I first shared that poem with Mary Szybist, and she identified the diction as being arch or Ashberian in the letter part, and she asked me why that was, and I thought about it. I was like, “Well, I was trying to absorb his diction.” I wanted so badly to be close to Lawrence that I took on his own language to address him. Is that strange?

And so then you have that part that’s the letter, that almost sounds like him, but it’s talking to him. And then you have the biographical footnotes underneath that have a lot of extracts from his life. And you go through that, and then there are the autobiographical sub-footnotes at the bottom. I think I was just trying to trace down and find the personal in all of that very academic writing that I was reading about him. People love to analyze him, and he’s mysterious and a little morally ambiguous. He caused a lot of chaos, too, you know. And we still deal with the fallout from that period of history, and the British actions during that time. 

For sure.

With Dempsey, too, the boxer that I wrote a long poem in response to,  he’s the author of Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense, which, by the way, has quite a voice; he was a very fun person to read. 

Yeah. I got that sense from reading your poem. I was like, she clearly enjoyed reading this book, and it sounds pretty good, actually. But I like how you mentioned the footnotes and sub-footnotes, too, because I feel like I’ve never really seen poems written in such a way before, where there’s this side-by-side reading experience through the footnotes that allows the reader to see what you’re responding to. And then you have that extra level of sub-footnotes that are appended to the bottom with that personal connection. One of the footnotes in your Lawrence poem talks about Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and that particular scene that describes when he was beaten and raped at Deraa. It points out that in his handwritten manuscript, the language depicting the incident is the smallest and most difficult to read. And this felt really apt, considering your use of even smaller subfootnotes that bring in harrowing revelations and intimate details from your life that completely reshaped my reading of the poem. Similar to reading Lawrence’s shrinking handwriting, one can sense that hesitation, but also the necessity of those extra segments. Can you talk a little bit more about that decision to use footnotes in that way?

Well, I think you have already identified part of it. It’s that instinct to stay close to him, and he has that diminishment of the handwriting, and so the sub-footnotes are smaller. The smallest writing holds the thing that he’s most ashamed of, too, and that was also true for me.

It was a way to divulge, but also to humble the autobiographical details by keeping them small. They’re the shortest section, and keeping them small through the smallest font. Because they’re in some ways like a seed to what comes above. But they’re also small next to that, and I wanted that to be the case.

Yeah, it’s interesting, too, because he’s such a large personality. It’s paradoxical to have these moments where even he feels small. 

Yeah.

One other thing I was wondering about that poem is the psychological nuance of his relationship with his family, and his mother. Was that something that really stuck out to you when reading through his life?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, his mother was very ashamed of having had him out of wedlock. And she was concerned that he was going to sully himself or masturbate. She was obsessed with purity in her children, and particularly in him, for some reason. Maybe she identified more closely with him, but he was circumcised at a much too old age. I think it was traumatic for him. It was supposed to make him less likely to masturbate, or I guess that was the idea. But also, you know, kids cry and whine and stuff, and in the Victorian era, you could just have a doctor come and shoot them up with opium.

Wow, really?

He went through that, too. So it’s like he was drugged, and he was hit, and he was shamed, and he went through a lot at a very young age. I think it ends up informing his feelings around that later beating and rape, and also his subsequent asexuality, I mean, as far as we’re aware.

I need to ask you about “Scrap,” your poem about Jack Dempsey. It really surprised me when I was wading through the poems and reading sonnet sequences and wild anagrammatic experiments and a Bishop-like meditation on an ancient fish. And then, seemingly out of nowhere: boxing. But then again, when I got to the footnotes and saw you thinking through Dempsey from your own personal lens, I started to see the intersections. And I guess the one that stood out to me most is knowing that you were a professional dancer, and that maybe you’re connecting to the gracefulness of the sport, like the way that the body is thrown around and maneuvered. Wielding Dempsey’s voice, you write, “The falling step is key. Make your weight explosive.” So I was wondering, was dance, at least in part, a gateway into boxing and Dempsey’s life?

Well, his book, it’s a guide for boxers, but it’s also a guide to the way his brain works, and it’s a guide to him and his views on manhood.

Was it like reading the Andrew Tate of 1928?

Oh, my God! (Laughs) Not exactly. It was a riot, but it’s very spoken and very vernacular, and it just feels like he’s talking to you. I would actually stand against the wall and do the exercises that he said to do. I would practice the line of how the punch falls and stuff. 

That’s great. So you can’t help but to embody who you’re reading. First, you were using Lawrence’s voice, and then you were throwing punches just like Dempsey.

Yeah, I was throwing phantom punches and shadowboxing. Who knew that writing was so active that you can actually burn calories at it? I was also just interested in the fact that a round of boxing is called a stanza, and there’s this round form, the rondeau, and what it would be like to formally relate those two things with each other. It just feels like boxing and poetry share something. Poems have meter, which is comprised of feet, so there’s the whole footwork thing, and there were some delightful opportunities for play.

Because I studied neuroscience, or just because I care about the brain and mental health, it’s actually really hard for me to watch any sport where someone takes a blow to the head. I don’t watch American football. I even struggle sometimes watching hockey. I watched a lot of videos of boxing for this, and it’s just harrowing to watch a boxing match.

Yeah.

And yet I so admire the concentration of it, and it’s a very old form. One of my favorite sculptures is the Boxer at Rest, and it’s a Roman bronze. I forget exactly where it was excavated from, but this boxer is hunched over, and he’s rusting, and he’s nude, and you see all these scars and cuts on his face and his body. He presumably had stone eyes at some point, but they’re gone, so it’s just these hollow sockets. It’s from a moment that was obsessed with representing the human as ideal; it actually represents his muscularity and power, but the skin has been lacerated and stuff, so you see realism smuggled into this ideal form. It has this posture of exhaustion. I think that that sculpture was very much on my mind when I was writing this, too. It’s a playful set of poems on the one hand, but boxing also has very high stakes. People have died doing it.

That’s true.

And was it a happy accident that his second wife’s name was Estelle, which has a nice chiming with your Astrophil and Stella sequence?

Yes (laughs), yes, yeah. Thank you for noticing. Yeah, I was delighted. I was like, “Oh, yes,” and what a character she is, too.

She sounds like it!

You could write a whole persona poem in her voice,  I’m sure. You know,  it’s harder to find some of the documents so that I could write these women of history. I would have liked to have written into their lives. Maybe my next assignment will be to.

Yeah, I was just gonna say.

Yeah, I had my time with the boys. 

Interview Posted: April 13, 2026