Late to the Search Party bookcover

Late to the Search Party

Poems

This title will be released on

calendar iconMay 6, 2025

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Description

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.

Product Details

PublisherScribner
Publish DateMay 06, 2025
Pages96
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781668081563
Dimensions212.7 X 139.7 X 7.1 mm | 90.7 g
BISAC Categories: Poetry, Poetry, Poetry

About the Author

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 PoetsBest of the NetPushcart 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.

Reviews

"Late to 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 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 

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