REVIEW: Late to the Search Party by Steven Espada Dawson

Poetry. 96 pgs. Scribner. May 2025. 9781668081563.

Steven Espada Dawson’s Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025) asks questions of how to move through the world amongst voids and ghosts, absences and presences that make it difficult to assess one’s own sense of self. Brilliantly sustaining varied emotions and experiences surrounding addiction, Late to the Search Party is a vital collection in conversation with Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec, Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and Joan Kwon Glass’s Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms. Dawson writes with a full commitment to craft, offering surprising yet satisfying verse full of images from the natural world, memory, and his imagination. His poetics are a masterclass of inventive form, balancing an astonishing rawness in the presentation of facts with a deeply reflective and caring tone throughout.

Late to the Search Party is organized into four sections and is preceded by a single poem, “A River is a Body Running” in which Dawson grounds the entire collection in the recall of a specific memory:

“The first time I found my brother
overdosed, he looked holy. A thing
not to be touched. Yellow halo of last
night’s dinner.” (1)

Dawson continues describing the scene, including the care his brother received by a cop and a paramedic. The narrative is somewhat self-interrupted when the speaker asks a question: “What is the difference between / a lake and a river?” As a reader, I was immediately pulled back to the title as an answer, to the movement and life of a river. It also brought Sonia Sanchez’s “Haiku [for you]” to mind, a short poem in which she says “loving you / is a long river running.” By starting the collection this way, Dawson shows reverence to his brother announces his holiness despite the pain and hurting both in this poem’s scene and the narratives within the entire project. Like rivers, both brothers are bodies that run alongside each other, flowing in and out of each other’s lives and memories. Such movement of water is akin to their bond: an immemorial force that’s forever-moving forward.

Dawson’s frequent use of the lead-in title kept me hooked in these stunning and heartbreaking poems. While creating little moments of surprise, coupled with deep specifics and emotional truth, Dawson maintains a haunting confessional tone from title to last line, page after page. For example, in Section 1, “From the Window, My Gowned Mother Salvages the Landscape” leads-into “and convinces herself the smog sunset is natural” (9) and the poem “Every Word is My Mother’s” continues with “favorite fruit” (10). Later in Section 2, the first line of “What I Hate Most About My Mom” flips the emotion behind the title by following it with: “is her dying” (25). These moments of dexterity with diction and storytelling within deep longing, self-reflection, and witness to suffering speak to the immense power of poetry. Dawson’s skill with craft allows him access to contradictions that otherwise might be unbearable at worse or incomprehensible at best. Too often are emotions and memories simplified to black or white. For Dawson, the act of writing is a space for discovery, even play—both of which lead to healing.

Dawson dedicated Late to the Search Party to his mother and brother; this allegiance and honoring continues in a series of elegies throughout the collection. Titled either “Elegy For the Four Chambers of My Mother’s Heart,” “Elegy For the Four Chambers of My Brother’s Heart,” or “Elegy For the Four Chambers of My Heart,” with multiples of each, these poems ground readers in the image of a literal heart, of the anatomy it takes to keep someone alive. The word chamber also alludes to the home, specifically a bedroom or otherwise private room. These poems are pockets of safe spaces where Dawson can mourn. He ends the first “Elegy For the Four Chambers of My Mother’s Heart” with “the beginning of life is too much. / The beginning of life is too much / like the end of it” (28). Such a profound reflection on the cyclical nature of life transcends the smaller scene in the poem of his mother microwaving popcorn.

Elegies are, under the surface, odes. They are love poems, honoring the intimacy of family in small moments. In a later “Elegy For the Four Chambers of My Brother’s Heart,” Dawson recalls memories around pitching rocks with his brother:

“The slickest stones went farthest,
then sank anyway. That was always the goal, right? To disappear
them into the water, despite our pretending
one might find the other
in the end.” (39)

Both of the elegies mentioned above close on the idea of an ending, pulling the tone towards lamentation and layering sorrow atop of love.

Late to the Search Party is remarkable in its embrace of grief and insistence in love. While loved ones might be lost – across time and space – poetry is a type of re-accessing the past. With this collection, Dawson bravely and wisely practices a perspective articulated by poet by Hanif Abdurraqib who describes grief as “an emotion knocking on the door of memory and asking you to recall something.” With this collection, Dawson reaches for his mother and brother; that, ultimately, is a beautiful practice, celebrating the closeness of familial relationships and shared history with art.