Seeing it Everywhere: On Devon Walker-Figueroa's "Philomath"

Devon Walker-Figueroa | Philomath | Milkweed Editions | 2021 | 96 Pages

“Sometimes it seems / the future has a habit of repeating itself” writes Devon Walker-Figueroa in her debut, Philomath, a poetry collection with two separate arms: a woman’s childhood and coming of age amongst the masculine fugue required to survive a ghost town, and the struggle for continuance amid capitalism’s exploitations and abandonments.

Walker-Figueroa’s place-based narrative encapsulates a life in the Pacific Northwest, specifically a literal ghost town in Kings Valley, Oregon. The town is marked by a feeling of scraping by, “a kind of sick that takes saving up for.” There are “gravel parking lots,” the “gutted sanctuaries of timber mills,” where the weird quirks and violence of organized religion are swallowed “because this is how you get close to God in Philomath.”

Philomath, the name of both abandoned town and the poetry collection, imbues the reader with a sense of discovery. Shane McCrae is right to say in his blurb that “[Walker-Figueroa] writes an America so absolutely American it has been forgotten by America, an America so American one can’t believe it exists unless one has lived there, and if one has lived there one recognizes it everywhere.” He is right to stipulate its recognition everywhere because we see it across this country—capitalism’s abandonments of exploited people.

By way of comparison, it is no coincidence that the people of Appalachia (where I grew up), who are historically bold enough to muster up armed insurgencies in dissent, have also been the subjects of a decades-long media smear campaign and left to fall into poverty and infrastructural decay. This has been well documented by collections such as William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind, to which Philomath bears a striking resemblance. Walker-Figueroa’s text joins this chorus of the exploited, demonstrating how our economic system maligns regions across the country, and that the Pacific Northwest has been decimated in many of the same ways as Appalachia and the Rust Belt—through economic austerity measures and entrapment in military, religion, and nationalism to serve an imperial endeavor:

…It seems we’ll get by
with our lie a little longer, if only
because the nematodes are failing
to save the Yukon Golds & the thistle is
going to seed & Mark, a family
friend who happens to be hard
up, is sleeping on the couch, asking us
to call him Lucky like it’s Desert
Storm all over again…

As with all good place-based writing, Philomath is more than pastoral; it is intensely personal and intimate with its surroundings. Walker-Figueroa demonstrates that a place is more than its ecosystem and infrastructure. More than anything else, it is its people. This is communicated through retellings of personal moments that color in their settings:

from a man who smokes a Marlboro Red
every hour of his life. I’m grateful for
the company, the mindless knock-
knock jokes, the scent of his leather jacker
in the closet. He has a way of being
the loneliest person you’ve ever met, besides
yourself, except when he’s holding
his Maverick & teaching you how
to aim for the hay man’s heart,
the one who wears the blue
button-up he forgot you
bought him for his birthday.

These recollections are all of intimate recognition–the poet refusing estrangement from her place of origin. The collection includes an abundance of longer poems, displaying a tendency towards generosity of description akin to that of Ross Gay rather than crystallization of any single aspect to become the poem’s fulcrum. Walker-Figueroa’s tool chest contains many poetic maneuvers, but it is easily apparent that her favorite is juxtaposition. She places things in adjacency and lets the reader draw their own conclusions.

This juxtaposition takes center stage in the first two poems: “Philomath” and “Permission to Mar.” Here she stacks heaven and hell against each other along with the internal and external, constructing a thorough and explicit picture of her childhood: writing her name on the walls in crayon, knowing better than to watch her friend’s bulimia firsthand, witnessing the aftermath of addiction, watching a town sink into itself, the river carrying all things forward into tomorrow.

Walker-Figueroa shows herself to be a master of the poem never being about what the poem is about, often because of said juxtaposition. Not necessarily due to metaphor, but because the panorama of each poem offers too many views for it to ever only be about one thing. My favorite example of this occurs in the poem “After Birth,” where she recounts being told how cougars seek out the placentas of horses after they’ve birthed foals. The poem pretends to be about sexual violence at first–and by that I also mean the violence imposed by norms and policing of “sex”–but it is really about being a late-bloomer and the self-doubt that characterizes growing up:

all I can think of is blood, how we first feed
on it without knowing

we feed on it or that it possesses   a plan all its own. Every girl
I know has started, nicknamed it
Florence or Flo or the Red Badge   of Courage. It’ll be years
for me. When a doctor finally says      I’ve fallen so far
off the growth chart he’s worried

 I won’t find my way back,     I’m fourteen
& can still go out shirtless
without causing a stir. “Eat more butter,” he says, but I don’t
yet believe      what I eat will help me hate

              my body any less. Reed doesn’t hate
his kids. He loves them      too much is the story. People tell me
                  to avoid him, but I don’t.

Philomath is riddled with moments that make themselves aware of our Anthropocene’s extinction events and progressive societal dilapidation. There is a grappling that ensues—how to deal with personal pain amidst public and pervasive suffering, something becoming a hallmark of contemporary poetry delivering a cultural critique. It is important to note however that this book is not merely a compendium of suffering. The characters lead textured lives and there is a wild abundance of tenderness:

She loved nearly
any animal that wasn’t
cut out for living—like
orphaned fawns & withdrawn
addicts she’d find
trembling at rest
stops along Route 20, like cedar
waxwings that mistook glass
for the space that lives
behind glass. Under the last
incense-cedar in the back
yard, we had a whole
boneyard of birds—
Toby, Thelma, Obadiah. We didn’t know
their sex. We didn’t know
why they camped all winter
long when they had bodies
that could carry them
some place warm & somehow full
of promise.

It is a complicated message the book delivers—the need to escape a place that is consuming you and the ones you love coupled with the desire to rescue said place from itself. The questions posed here are not moralized or truly ever answered. And as much as they are questions about the purpose of grief, they are also questions about why people stay in a place that is hurting them. Sometimes it is the only thing they understand. Sometimes for other people. Sometimes they desire the breaking. What is clear is that even in leaving the places we’ve rooted ourselves, they remain with us always:

I wonder when
it began, the belief
that the part of us that’s always been
dead keeps growing after what we call
life has left the room.