A Glutton for Duration

Devon Walker-Figueroa discusses eros, eternity, and her new collection ‘Lazarus Species’ with LARB’s poetry editor Elizabeth Metzger.

By Elizabeth MetzgerFebruary 10, 2026

• Poetry

DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA first offered me a peek into an early draft of Lazarus Species (2025) in fall 2022. I was so overtaken by the book that I not only dreamed of it but also lived in my dreams of it. The playful linguistic verve and swerving cerebral challenges are of a caliber few poets dare to attempt, and fewer can pull off without sacrificing the soul. In Lazarus Species, the soul and brain are beakers that fill each other back and forth until it’s impossible to see either one as ever empty. Logic is what time does to language, in arcs and leaps. Like the speaker, the reader of this collection is less concerned with “being present” than with dancing between the before and after. Walker-Figueroa’s lines cascade, manipulating the page just enough to settle us in a certain attitude before unsettling us with a new mode or form. Complex forms are erased into free verse. Sonics seesaw semantics. Alchemy becomes an expectation. Metaphors transcend their sense, twisting the scientific into the spiritual.

While Philomath (2021) maps the mythic realms and repercussions of a location, Lazarus Species is a sequel of transformations, more perception and processing than retrospection and return. An agile alacrity of mind turns the pages of Walker-Figueroa’s second collection into the speaker’s invisible cloak, so that when the speaker dresses in personae (Mary Cotton, Nikola Tesla), she simultaneously strips down to the poet herself. In other words, informative decadence is emotive nakedness. How is a caesura lush? How are footnotes an orchestra? Even the two-part structure is a Blakean subversion of binaries, rejecting fixity and, for that matter, identity. The limberness of language allows the reader to be dead and alive at once, without reproducing or ever dying out. Syntax is an organ system. This is not the poetry of experience, nor what could be mistaken as the poetry of knowledge. Lazarus Species is a book of selves reckoning with the crisis of what can’t be, what may not come, what a self is and is not.

In a letter, Emily Dickinson personifies “Awe” as a man to whom the poet returns, then follows with “[Awe] was an awful mother.” But in Lazarus Species, Awe does mother, raising even her own griefs, revealing realities that can only be born via the labor of the imagination. Never an embarrassment of riches, every feeling here is complex enough to sustain its equal and opposing feeling. Perhaps what is most exquisite about Walker-Figueroa’s poetry is the way it magnifies a moment, sometimes by making it seem eternal, other times by giving time itself visible and sensory qualities. Lazarus Species celebrates in one held breath both the pressure to change and the paradox of enduring while endangered.

I read Lazarus Species on the subway, scrawling illegible questions for the poet in the margins. As I struggled to read my own handwriting, which bled at times into the lines, my frustration turned into a kind of commingling. Perhaps the poems even invite this kind of uncanny cohabitation. Our conversation has this same spirit, questions and answers in creaturely relation, making their own relevance at a slant, so that I feel each question could have led us deeper into a realm of total surprise. In spring 2024, Walker-Figueroa and I discussed poetry and life while wandering through an exhibit called Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance at the Met. Reading Lazarus Species, I kept thinking about how I felt looking at art together, our “catching up” not distracting but somehow sharpening our gaze. In her poems, Walker-Figueroa never quite exposes the mystery of her intricate poetic process, but in Lazarus Species, and in this conversation, she brings us into greater intimacy with mystery itself.

¤

ELIZABETH METZGER: The first poem, the title poem, is sort of a birth poem that ends with “Is this grief / the inexactitude we’d hoped for?” The idea that grief in any way is something we’d hope for fascinates me. There is so much precision in this book—is exactitude what transforms grief into an absurd paradise?

DEVON WALKER-FIGUEROA: I love that idea, of an absurd paradise—moreover, of one that is derived from grief in some way. The book, and specifically the ghazal you reference and those closing lines of the title poem, do seem to flirt with such a notion, though I’m not sure how conscious of that I was while initially drafting.

The longer I live, the more I notice with what fundamental imprecision emotions present themselves to us. The most profound grief can mingle with a sense of freedom, even relief; the greatest hope might be entangled with a sense of doom; and that dreaded thing coming to fruition might release us, however momentarily, from the burden of anticipating it. So, we might be tormented in one way and consoled in another through the process of grief, which is far more mysterious than we tend to give it credit for.

I also suspect that the longing for inexactitude or mystery—the hope that all knowledge is provisional and incomplete—is deeply human. Any time you define something utterly, you reduce it in some way; you exert a kind of force over it that, rather than expanding your sense of what it and your relation to it may be, parameterizes the possible.

All to say, the title poem, and the book more broadly, concerns itself with those contradictions that nurture our sense of mystery and self and art—our intimate if unavoidable involvement with the unknowable.

In “The Perch” and many other poems, there is a lot of language of measurement (of time and size). I think of the measure of verse, but what does measurement have to do with the poems in Lazarus Species?

Measurement has so much to do with verse just generally, as it does with music, with the preparation of digestible food or the building of a domicile, with our sense of what’s ahead and what’s behind us, with tallying change or trying to chart it, with the attempt to see one’s own life and mind in proportion to life and consciousness writ large. There’s a passage from Plato’s Lysis that comes to mind here, in which Socrates tells Gorgias what he would say to a hypothetical interlocutor: “[I]f he asked again: ‘What is the art of calculation?’ I should say, That also is one of the arts which is concerned wholly with words.” Basically, Socrates subordinates math and systems of measurement to language here. It’s a steep claim, but an intriguing one, perhaps especially to poets.

In terms of size and time specifically, like language, these are things the poet, in a way, alchemizes. Silence is our medium as much as words are. You can’t really perceive one without the other. And ideally, a poem’s silences are at least as active as the words set down on the page. Each pause, each thrillingly unstable in-between moment, is when the reader gets to exercise their will the most, I suspect, when they really get to collaborate with you most intimately on the task of signification.

In “Glossolaliac” and other poems, language itself is a substance that can change and escape. Is language a brain? A civilization? Whatever it is, what is form, or even the page, in relation to it?

What a wonderful question. Well, if language is a kind of brain, it is one whose neurons might be individual listeners and speakers. What happens when two neurons fire together across centuries and language barriers? Maybe that’s just the everyday magic of a modern person picking up an ancient hymn from Sumer and, with the help of many scholars and translators, co-authoring a new impression with that ancient mind and all the intervening minds that brought the two together. I’m not sure. But it is an attractive metaphor, if not more than a metaphor.

Form, the page … everything that might be considered the material mechanisms of preserved language is a bit like a fossil of someone’s most interior thoughts as those thoughts are manifested in a phenomenon between language and song. Then someone else encounters this fossil, this page, and resurrects the instance of its making, only the instance is transformed in that resurrection. It doesn’t remember its prior life, as the writer thought of it. It inhabits this new life that the reader has created for it with that writer’s help.

In “Desert Theater,” you write: “But who hasn’t sat longingly in the / mezzanine / of their half-lost life”? Is there an artifice to absence? How do you see poetry and/or life as theater? Is death our greatest drama?

Yeats essentially calls eternity an artifice in “Sailing to Byzantium,” so why can’t absence be an artifice as well? In poetry, I think, it both is and is not. The writer is a bit like Schrödinger’s cat. They die, yes. They become absent, like anyone does. But then, when someone is reading a poem of theirs, a little fragment of that gone consciousness glints again. So they’re there but they’re also, in a very real way, not. Their artifice, like the substance of their most durable thoughts, continues to toy with eternity. To animate time’s doomed theater.

The mezzanine of a half-lost life is written, in a way, for Nicholson Baker and Dante Alighieri. One wishes one could resurrect the latter, have a meandering conversation with him over a deep cup of bitter red wine or while wandering along a goat path.

I don’t know what our greatest drama is. Probably, it hasn’t yet been written. The theater … Well, that’s a tough one to tackle. When you are raised religious, as I was, your whole mind can feel like a theater whose only audience members are you and God. Can something as involuntary as consciousness also be performative? I think it can, but maybe not for long stretches. The guard comes down, you know? The mind tires of its performances. Even prayer might become involuntary at some point.

In so many poems, such as “[Horns Within]” (published in the LARB Quarterly!) or “The Peasant’s Orgasm,” eros is something between human and nonhuman. In the former, a pane of glass becomes a boundary. In the latter, eating meat is an animal touching the tongue as if in a kiss: “That the same flesh passed over the two men’s tongues.” Are poems erotic creatures? Do poems come to you this way, or what is erotic about the inhuman, the earth?

I can never thank you enough for supporting my work as you have. It’s been a huge honor to have poems in LARB over the years. You really just curate such exceptional issues. I’m always delighted to read them and in awe of your ability to be such a tremendous poet, editor, teacher.

Such an intriguing question about eros and the inhuman. I think our curiosities are not easily extricable from eros. There’s this eerie memory I have of being a toddler and staring over the back of a car seat at my grandfather’s glass eye. There was mucous gathering around the seam between the glass and flesh. I was transfixed. I was very curious and disturbed by the image of his eye, which did not look back at me, though its companion did. And while I would like to say that this experience of early and intense curiosity was not erotic, I would be lying if I said there wasn’t something akin to arousal coursing through my still-so-recent body. I bring it up because I’m not sure where the line is between those two things. What makes something—a poem, or even a feeling of curiosity—erotic or not? Where is the line between frisson and arousal?

As for the snail in “[Horns Within],” which is a stage direction from King Lear … I guess I don’t feel particularly at home among people or “in the deciphered world,” as Rilke called it. In many ways, I feel sort of alien or even subhuman much of the time, like I’m closer to the forms of life that people have historically claimed dominion or superiority over. Maybe I relate to the slug, the snail, because it’s a bit like this weird tongue dragging along the earth, tasting it, lowly without perceiving itself as such, moved along by forces it doesn’t understand. Leaving a brief residue of itself on all it passes over.

In “[Enter Hero]” and elsewhere, there is a notion of genre bending and blending as one sort of revival of self. There is a power in this physical and metaphysical transformation—can you say more about the “secret I keep with the earth”? In the capaciousness and pulsing encyclopedia of your poetry, there is a sense of total and generous disclosure, but can you tell us one secret you keep as a poet?

Perhaps this is obvious to a reader and not a secret at all, but when I’m writing a poem, it’s very important to me to consider the way the space and the language fit together to choreograph the reader’s eye movement over the page. Maybe this is also something the poems already disclose, but I often begin poems in form that don’t end up in form. You might feel a villanelle or englyn or ottava rima in the DNA, but it won’t always be the foremost thing. In fact, it’s often corroded, I think, beyond recognition by the final draft. So it was with many of the poems in Philomath anyhow. For example, the poem “After Birth” was originally drafted in ottava rima (which autocorrect desperately wants to turn into “Ottawa rim”), but I don’t think most people, even formalist poets, would guess that from reading the final draft.

Many poems in part two use extensive footnotes: they directly follow the poem, often for pages, even longer than the poem itself. One footnote is about a page long, essay-like and informative. The last footnote of “Citadel” is subfootnoted. What is the footnote for you? Is it part of the poem, its own anti-poem, a textual notion of afterlife?

There is, now that you mention it, something deathly about a footnote, a certain acknowledgment of the text having ended or been put on pause, of the larger work being disrupted in some way. Footnotes, among other things, allow for a kind of stratification of the impulses behind a poem. And that, among other possibilities, intrigues me. The subfootnotes in “Citadel” have at times struck me as a form of cowardice or, to be gentler, avoidance—a burial of the thing I’m ashamed to admit. I also have, at times, thought of the sub-footnotes almost like the culminating haiku at the end of a haibun. A journey is underway or has been completed; now for this more compressed part, the weight of this small stone, as it were, to keep the map that is the preceding poem from blowing away. But it lacks a season, unless the season could be “heaven.” All to say, that math doesn’t quite work. But what hopefully does work, for the reader, is this invitation to dig down through various textual and psychological strata to find something under the surface of that landscape, letter, sestina, obsession.

I think of the “polyphase sestets” as both the most alchemical and the most cerebral of the collection. There’s a kind of overwhelm that suddenly blooms into clarity like a chemical equation that must be balanced by the reader. Can you talk more about the polyphase sestet, perhaps the most innovative form in the collection?

What a beautiful figuration, blooming into clarity. There is something about the polyphase sestet form, such as I conceived of it, that courts clarity, even while seeming to make anything like an epiphany impossible. It prohibits the kind of semantic movement necessary for that. All to say, there is an at-odds-ness about the form. Like the rotating magnetic field that inspired it, the polyphase sestet’s movements are oriented toward a self-perpetuating rotation … from Dane Tesla’s POV to Nikola Tesla’s, but also from north to south, death to life, invention to inventor, and on and on.

The way one stream of current replaces another in the transformers the rotating magnetic field was invented for, so the consciousnesses of these two characters trade places. I would compare the effect to a fugue’s, but a fugue allows for simultaneity. In this case, it’s truly a one-voice-carries-the-melody-at-a-time kind of structure. As in, the parts could harmonize, but won’t, because they can’t coexist. As in a medieval hocket, the voices must take turns.

It seems this collection wants to disrupt the neat separation we make between speaker and poet. Are the speakers of your poems more dressed-up or more naked?

I supposed my poems are dressed up like Kent in the hovel in King Lear: their nudity is their costume. To be without clothes is to shed respectability. But it is also to claim a raw form of one’s own humanity. To be, in Kent’s words, a “poor, bare, forked animal.”

It might be relevant here that I briefly worked as an art model. And I recall standing nude in front of a classroom of amateur artists, and it was terribly humbling. You feel yourself being created by each person, and every version of you will be a lesson and a failure. You might want to stack your 20 pairs of warped hands in a pile and set them on fire, to watch your variously skewed faces melt into each other. So form can become a craving for deformation, I think. And maybe that relates to this question of the poem’s apprehension of how it comes to exist, but I will leave that to the readers.

Upon finishing the collection, I returned to your epigraph from Sylvia Plath: “Eternity bores me, / I never wanted it.” How is your poetry in conversation with this quotation? There seems to be no boredom here, and maybe a lot of hunger for eternity, but correct me, please, if I’m wrong.

I suppose I read the sly suggestion in that quote of eternity boring a hole through the speaker, making a void in her. And that, for me, complicates what the “it” is. The eternity? Okay, sure. The void that eternity wormholes into one? Maybe that too. Also, if you think about it, eternity would have the power to render the greatest pleasure tiresome. Even an orgasm would cease to excite one if it were constant and lasted for years. Even the vision of the sky or the scent of woodsmoke could lose its luster if it became an eternal companion. We can’t really know for sure because none of us has experienced eternity. But we have to at least entertain the possibility that she’s also imagining, and perhaps with accuracy, what effect eternity, or abiding within its probability, could have on her.

As for myself, I live somewhere between this fear of boredom, which is not my default mode, and then the hunger for eternity that Pessoa writes of. A kind of ravening for time, more of it and more of it. A glutton for duration.

In “Noise Cancelling,” you write: “my looks & mind / too much that I am real / only to myself. No matter. / Even heaven goes to hell, / in time, in / time.” What is hell for heaven? What is the revision of the future?

Hell is heaven’s permission to exist. Heaven needs and craves its counterpart, I imagine. As for the revision of the future, I suspect it’s written on a card I am forbidden to see.

¤

Devon Walker-Figueroa grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range, and received her education from Chemeketa Community College, Cornell University, Bennington College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and New York University, where she was the Jill Davis Fellow in fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and ZYZZYVA, and her debut collection of poems, Philomath, was selected by Sally Keith for the National Poetry Series, won the Levis Reading Prize, and was the first collection of poems to be a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Walker-Figueroa has worked as a professional ballet and modern dancer, research assistant, classical harpist, bartender, literary editor, and creative writing instructor, and is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

¤

Featured image: Author photo by David Evan McDowell.