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Table of Contents
About The Book
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.
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.
Appearances
MAY 6
19:00:00
in person
Madison Central Library
In Person
In conversation with Nate Marshall & Paul Tran
201 W Mifflin Street
Madison, WI 53703
MAY 13
19:00:00
in person
Boswell Book Company
In Person
In partnership with Woodlawn Pattern
2559 N Downer Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53211
MAY 19
18:00:00
in person
MAY 20
0:00:00
in person
Milkweed Books
In Person
In conversation with Michael Torres
1011 Washington Ave S
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
JUN 13
0:00:00
in person
Madison Concourse Hotel
In Person
Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Conference
1 W Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
About The Author
Photograph by Taylor Kirby
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.
Product Details
- Publisher: Scribner (May 6, 2025)
- Length: 96 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668081563
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Raves and Reviews
"Late to the Search Party reads like the kind of collection a poet builds toward their entire career—that it's Steven Espada Dawson's debut is frankly a little absurd. The poems are formally brilliant, twisting received forms and inventing new ones to reflect the unprecedented irreplaceable lives that animate them. But it's the poems' psychospiritual maturity that feels really dazzling—Dawson rebukes lazy cynicism and defensive self-exonerating, again and again choosing rigor and complication over easy bromides. These are poems by a poet who has clearly done the work in the library stacks and in their own heart. Late to the Search Party announces Dawson as a lodestar of contemporary poetry's next generation."
—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times best-selling author of Martyr!
"How do you carry your family with you when you're the only one who has survived the furies of life? That impossible question drives this debut poetry collection. In these exquisitely crafted elegies, Steven Espada Dawson writes of how addiction and absence and illness and grief can become a new center of gravity. The poems in Late to the Search Party stitch together the memories of a family torn apart by circumstance, with threads of beauty, joy, rage and undying love."
—Roxane Gay, New York Times best-selling author of Bad Feminist
"Late to the Search Party is an astonishing first book. Steven Espada Dawson’s elegies are searing, brilliantly built, gorgeous and heart-rending. Vulnerability and craft are inseparable. I felt many things while reading these poems. Sorrow. Admiration. Wonder. Dawson is a magnificent poet and I am thankful for these poems."
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
"Dawson’s elegiac longing for a missing brother, a dying mother, and the “gorgeous myth of childhood” teems with an oil-painter’s tenebrous music. These poems feel like stacked polaroids worn from warm hands where we travel through memories like arterial blood flowing through the chambers of a heart. There’s a stricken frankness here familiar to those who grieve, and a resilient sweetness guiding us through uneven terrain. I love this lyric; it reminds me how 'light shines through the gristle.'"
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
- Book Cover Image (jpg): Late to the Search Party Trade Paperback 9781668081563
- Author Photo (jpg): Steven Espada Dawson Photograph by Taylor Kirby(0.1 MB)
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