Late to the Search Party

by Steven Espada Dawson

Scribner, 2025

Review by Diya Abbas

On Late to the Search Party by Steven Espada Dawson

As a child following my resident mother down the septic hallways of the hospital, I suspected each nurse was a ghost disguised in baby blue scrubs. Not much has changed. Hospitals are still an interval of consequence, my mother is still at work, and death never got new clothes. Late to the Search Party honors the body as I have grown up to know it, articulating its forms of tragedy with valor.

Steven Espada Dawson plays the marionette strings of memory and proves that a group of wilted flowers is still a bouquet. Dawson’s debut poetry collection captures “humanized life1” with acute intellect and confidence. Who does not know what it is to love the brother and mother in this collection through the familiarity of forms like the sonnet and elegy and through the kinks and bonds of its disorders? I recognize the infinite arrangements of the motif running throughout the collection: Love that runs like wind through the four chambers of the heart. These poems sustain memory by collapsing the lyric and narrative continuum through the utterly human, while simultaneously collapsing the life and death continuum through the spiraling black hole, where not even light can escape the unbreakable gravity of grief. Dawson’s debut asks: How do you learn to love the endless quest? Of faith?

Dawson writes with a sturdy, assured sincerity in solitude. These are poems without hesitation, no time for pen to paper annotations.. No ledger for accent or doubt: a clean server of the flesh. The calls to action in these poems are calls to the human.

I am physically shaken out of my body how, I imagine, an older sibling reminds you to act right. Dawson returns the human back into a violent world that numbs us. A world that wishes to numb us. With power and weight, Dawson expands the human sensorium into humanized life at a time where I am not sure what defines “human” anymore. Dawson reminds us that poems are a part of our arsenal: our fists enter the ring of identification. What do we have left of our gone but the image of them? A title from part three of the collection reads, “Litany of Brother’s Heirlooms.” The repetition of images is like the repetition of prayer is like the repetition of the page. By crafting alternative images we can weave alternative fabrics of memory. Familiarity bleeds through the collection. In “Lake Mendota, After Sunset”:

“The local hush-hush bubbling

up from the city’s slushed lung”

As a student at the University by Lake Mendota, Dawson is right. The people here are always a little drunk. The sonics match the scenery. I am there. Dawson wields entrances to collective memories. In the Poem “Salvation Sonnet,” Dawson uses what he calls “orphaned objects” to access the familiar, the familial, the known, the questionable, and the unbreakable bonds of intimacy. We’ve all been there: the fast food we greased down in empty parking lots, the first shave that leads to a pricking series of blood clots, the teenagers working at the Salvation Army, a TV lit in the dark. We share certain narrative truths which unite us as real—as human, and true. These “orphaned objects” are our tools for introspection. How can language wield a family from disaster? From “Every Words is My Mother’s”:

“I want so badly to write words

with a future attached.”

Later from the same poem:

“While standing outside her hospital door

a crowd of doctors promised me

there is no such thing as dying

of an old age. Every body fails

from something more precise—”

What is more precise than the poem? Than the page? Dawson’s wit posits the incongruent, absurdity of grief through sarcasm and humor. What does play look like on the page? Could these be the tools that must follow grief in order to survive it? And is

this how we get through it, by rare moments of joy? In “Letica Knows Your Weight”:

“Martin joked

you could tell how bad a person is

by how long they wait to masturbate after a funeral.

”

and in “Self-Portrait as Moon Corpse”:

“The Ouija board said nothing,

then told me to floss more.”

I am riddled by the holy, cold light of heartache stuck in my throat. I can’t swallow the poem but I have to. I can’t help but shake my head and laugh.

The two broad strokes of poetry have been identified as lyric and narrative. I’m not sure how much I agree with poems fitting comfortably on a strict axis point. Late to the Search Party sets an alternative precedent to our formal classifications of poetic devices, collapsing the ordered lyric and narrative continuum. The images in these poems move with the whip of Dawson’s wrist, like wind through a chime. I entrust the next line to carry our image forward. The certainty of grief is relayed through the certainty of the image. As a reader, I am never abandoned. Dawson breaks your heart and then does the work of repairing it. He always shows up. With the confidence and quip of writers like Richard Siken, Olga Broumas, Sharon Olds, Gabrielle Bates, and Kaveh Akbar, Steven Espada Dawson articulates the utterly human with raw elegance. Form becomes the meditation between reality and the

page. Form convinces form. Memory convinces memory. The mind bends at the arsenal of his writing.

Dawson’s sonnets seem to sing to the poetic machinery of memory. I am reminded of another quote by Clarice Lispector: “love is something before love.”(1) What precedes love is a life that is required to be lived in order for there to be proof of loss. What is the life that made love possible? Where is grief placed between the fluxes of life and love? And how do we invent life again into rooms of unanswerable silences? You rewrite the fabric of truth through arenas of making. In “Elegy for the Four Chambers of

my Brother’s Heart”:

“Shadows of buildings

sieve moonlight like a family quilt.”

The collection itself is a giant constellation, a knitted quilt, a collage of glass, a slice of a pie. Each poem of this collection is a gear. We must hold the scattered fractions of life and love together as well as the spaces of loss between them. In a way, Dawson writes to ash. In a visiting lecture at UW Madison, Jos Charles said, “Ash testifies to a fire that is not there.” (2) Similarly I think life testifies to a death that is not there. Ash is proof that we were once here. I would do anything to repeat the same memory over and over of our Beloveds. I would do anything to bring back the smoke from that blunt we shared. And that is why we turn to the page, to create infinite machines of happening. In “The German Word for Hospital is Sick House”:

“I’m convinced a bell will ring

in some far place inside me.”

This bell is placed where the wind never stops. Perhaps the space between the heart and the ribcage holding memory, is both the past and present In “Late to the Search Party”:

“Death’s first lesson: I am always

in the present tense.”

This fleeting sense of holding memory reminds me of Édouard Glissant’s proposal of errantry: the condition of wandering with a sense of sacred motivation. I believe errantry, like ash, is a feature of Late to the Search Party. The sense of perpetual search for the spiral order of life and death. Another line from “The German Word for Hospital is Sick House”:

“In my dreams

wind chimes

Spell a word I can’t pronounce.

Your death the wind. I cannot point to it.

I can only point to everything it moves.”

I cannot point to the ash we once smoked but I can point to the wind. I can’t shake the sense that my dead are still here because maybe they are. The elegies in this collection seem to be just as much about the living, the dead, and the in between. Death seems to take the form of a spiral. In the poem “Letica Knows Your Weight”:

“She told us los muertos son más

pesados que los vivos.”

She told us the dead weigh more than the living. Maybe we bear the dead and that's what makes the human body so heavy with grief. Our ghosts are as active as they were when they were alive. Maybe they live through us, but it depends on what you believe.

The four sections of the collection mimic elegies dedicated to the four chambers of the mother, brother, and the speaker’s own heart. The four are the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence. The space between these intersections are the poems. What do we inherit? The body? Its heart? The poem? Its heart?

The word “stanza” translates to “room”. The house that holds the rooms is on fire and its embers are beautiful. The work of the line break in these poems is intentional and sacred, bringing the untouchable into the same room or stanza. This is the work of poetry. In “Caldera”:

“When he starts to sprint away

I break the line like a femur.”

The poem is also a body, precise as a line break, keeping itself alive. If each stanza is a room or a chamber, what can we write into each chamber of our Beloved’s heart? In “on safety”:

“i am drawing my brother now, here, in the only way

that is safe for me.”

The best poetry begs us to ask questions. Each poem in this collection moves with the fervor of lightning, compelling us to go further. The clock too has four sections or chambers. Perhaps the page and the poem are a sight where our infinite imaginary can reexamine time through the invented timespeed of the page.

The poem, out of all our literary forms, allows us to best invent alternative timescapes. In “portrait of my missing brother caught in a spiderweb”:

“cards waiting for the right order we laid

belly down on our living

room floor making history I believe in

his return like I believe in the taste

of bay leaves.”

I need to keep going, need to find out what happens next. I can’t keep my eyes off the clock, its hands on the page. NASA describes a black hole as “strong enough that nothing - not even light - can escape.” (3) The image of the black hole imagery that seeps these pages represents the inescapable gravity of grief. The poems serve as chaotic forms, like the black hole, like grief and its wild angularities. In “Elegy For Brian, My Brother Who Has Been Missing for Ten Years”:

“My load of darks spinning

in the dryer’s black hole Hula-Hoop.”

These spiral disorders of absolute, spellbinding engrossment of the search party happen in the careful articulations of the poem. In “Ode Ending in a Phone Call”:

“A decade

dug that needle clean through the vinyl.

Cancer slipped you into that skipping

track’s dark orbit.”

The spiral of the record reminds me of tree rings of the family tree transfixed in the chaotic form of time. Like in dendrochronology, in absence, we are forced to look outside, towards patterns, forms, and shapes of our familial existences. We must follow what we can’t point to, the jokes, the shadows, the language, its recession and arrival to find signs that our Beloveds are still there. In “What I Hate Most About Mom”:

“Depending

which way you turn

the water is coming

or it has already left.”

How do you learn to love the endless quest of the search party? What do we do after the poem is over? After the noble commitment to honor our ancestors? This is what great poetry demands of us: action. Most importantly, what are we to do with these lessons? In “Wish”:

“A bus driver with swinging crucifix earrings

once told me the rope out of hell

is also on fire.”

The wisdom of our lives, our losses, our Beloved’s, our cities, our histories, our world beg us to move forward. They beg us for intensity, truth, and awareness. To identify strategies that move memory with new quips, new questions, and new connections. The ending of Late to the Search Party is never stagnant: it spirals. Dawson never keeps from us, he never withholds. Our responsibility to this collection is to remember. Our responsibility to this collection is to hold.

Notes:

(1). From Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H.

(2). Trans Poetics and the Power of Time: Panel with Jos Charles and Paul Tran

(3). Black Holes from science.nasa.gov

Iris Yu