Sustaining the Sense of Beginning, a Review of Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Philomath

 In “Next to Nothing,” near the end of her worthwhile debut poetry collection, Philomath, Devon Walker-Figueroa writes, “I have tried to preserve the sense / of beginning.” At face value, her objective—the “sense” (i.e., this feeling) of something new and creative—resists being preserved since this something risks losing its essence and becoming stale. How does one keep something fresh? Walker-Figueroa’s poetry holds this conundrum as she moves through the fluid, in-between space within modern poetry’s “make it new” spirit. In this collection, she navigates from place of constraint to one less constrained where she creatively expresses herself, and she emphasizes this movement and tension through her poetic skills in keen spatial awareness, language, and associations.

Throughout this collection, varied whitespace within a poem’s lines echoes the pulling apart and contracting of the speaker’s emotional state. The first of three “Out of Body” poems lyrically reveals…