"If trauma is a seed...you can decide to keep burying it or learn to tend to the thing it grows into.": A Conversation with Steven Espada Dawson on Late to the Search Party
- Brittany Torres Rivera
- Jun 30
- 7 min read
Buy: Late to the Search Party by Steven Espada Dawson | Scribner | May 2025 | $18.00 |
ISBN: 9781668081563
Your death the wind. I cannot point to it.
I can point to everything it moves.
—From “The German Word for Hospital is Sick House”
In Steven Espada Dawson’s Late to the Search Party, the speaker contends with his mother’s illness and his relationship with his older brother, an addict who was in and out of his life until he disappeared, which left him the only remaining member of his family. I had an email interview with him to discuss the dreamy, careful poems that comprise this elegiac debut.
Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): As I read and then reread the book, I was impressed by the thoughtfulness behind the motifs, the way they appear and reappear in key thematic moments, and then the way they seem to resolve, especially with the title poem. Could you talk about the editorial process of the book–how different it looks from when you first submitted it, in what order these poems were drafted, how they were arranged? Were there poems that you wrote to answer a “need” in the collection?
Steven Espada Dawson (SED): The collection started as my MFA thesis, and while I was proud of what I had made, I knew it needed a lot of work. Also, my thesis defense was in April of 2020, and the world was just coming to terms with the devastation that would be Covid-19. The book’s journey felt suddenly very small and unimportant during quarantine months. That helped me step away from it in a way that felt easier to accept than post-grad writer’s block.
I think the first draft of the book leaned more heavily on the aspect of dreams and dreaming. I learned that it was a way I gave myself permission to lean into strangeness. More importantly, it created a bigger distinction between author and speaker, which I think can be helpful during the drafting process. It’s an extra little shield when writing through tough subjects. It’s important to acknowledge because sometimes that shield can be cumbersome for the reader to hold.
I knew early on in the project what my first and last poems were going to be, as well as many of the anchoring pieces that begin and end sections. The poems in-between were a lot less clear, and eventually it seemed like every time I sat down I was just shuffling them haphazardly. One of my first readers (the irreplaceable Gabrielle Bates!) helped me reorder the guts.
The title poem was the kind of piece that I dodged writing for as long as possible. It started as a draft from years ago—something that felt like looking into the sun every time I touched it. After a reading, a well-meaning audience member asked me what I felt was a too-personal question: “If you could have your brother back, would you want that?” I realized that I hadn’t “answered” that in the book, and while I feel I don’t owe that knowing to my reader, I did feel compelled to answer it for myself. What is now “Late to the Search Party” was born, buried, and reborn as the title poem of the book and is one of just two poems added to the collection after it was already accepted for publication.
BTR: Throughout the collection, symbols of childhood, especially toys, are often marred by violence: they explode, combust, fire like weapons. To what degree is this violent nostalgia a function of painting the past with the knowledge of its future? How much of this violence was also true in the moment?
SED: Violence was definitely marbled into my growing up. I was brought up during and after the Rodney King riots in L.A. The city was tense, and the borders between neighborhoods—and more broadly between civilians and the police—were unmistakable. The first time I babysat for a neighbor, he showed me where he kept his revolver, how to point it at the door if someone tried to get in. I wasn’t a teenager yet and didn’t even know his last name.
I think there’s a lot in the book about masculinity that I didn’t really internalize until meeting it on the page. Growing up as a boy, it’s easy to miss the full extent of the violence you’ve been indoctrinated into. I’ve been physically harassed by the police and jumped by gang members several times, and I grew up accepting that as a fact of life. In middle and high school we talked about going to jail and prison with the same certainty that teenagers on TV shows talk about going to college. Until I was much older I didn’t realize that it didn’t have to be that way—and that there are tangible structural mechanisms working to make you feel like it did.
BTR: Memories with Brian always associate him with holiness, painting him as an angel or a martyr, for example. The speaker is often angry, disappointed, or frustrated with god, presumably for abandoning the speaker and his mother, as they hope for Brian’s return and for the speaker’s mother’s cancer. Could you talk about the interplay, if it exists, between faith, blame, and innocence in these poems?
SED: I never knew my father except from stories circulating the neighborhood. In that way he developed a kind of mythic status for me growing up. It didn’t help that talking about him was taboo. He was a legend I learned about only in whispers and rumors.
My brother and I are nine years apart, so it was easy to adopt him into that fatherly slot—especially as I was becoming a teenager. He was the primary figure teaching me the things I associated (then) with being a man. When his addiction peaked and he started to disappear for days, weeks, months—and eventually indefinitely—it was a familiar absence. Like my father, Brian became a legend. The only proof of life became exaggerated stories from the block that started with some version of “The last time I saw him he was…” He was also constantly hanging out with people whose nicknames became their identity, like “Lucky” who makes it into the collection. There was no difference for me between those one-word people like Lucky and those minor Greek gods whose names I couldn’t pronounce.
That is all to say it was easy to be frustrated with God as this fatherly figure that never showed up in the flesh, that people only talked about in stories. Someone that was important and divisive. I see my speaker’s anger and disappointment and frustration with God as a reflection of my own feelings for the men in my life who are more significant in their absence. The folks you doubt and surrender to and fear and look for anyway.
BTR: In the title poem, we learn that Brian had been a florist, which answers the references to flowers and plants that recur throughout the collection. This made me think about tending and care, and the continuum of attention and abandonment that Brian enacts toward his plants and family. He shares moments of tender connection with the speaker, which the speaker clearly cherishes, that plant seeds which the speaker longs to reap in an adulthood plagued by Brian’s absence. Do you feel that these poems enact a similar kind of tending or attention?
SED: When you have a criminal record, you’re often working odd jobs, especially if you’re just leaving incarceration or living in a halfway house. I remember one of my brother’s jobs was unfolding and hanging those gigantic flags that they have outside of car dealerships. (Unfortunately, that means I still think of him whenever I’m passing through a highway town.)
Before his last major relapse, Brian he was a florist for many months. Despite his discomfort with the artform running counter to his rigid ideas of masculinity, it was definitely the happiest I ever saw him. Memories of him showing my mom pictures of bouquets that he put together are on my nostalgia’s highest shelf.
The motifs of flowers and blooming show up a lot in the collection because of that. But also, I think, because that’s how all this unpacking has worked for me. If trauma is a seed—one you often don’t get the choice of planting—you can decide to keep burying it or learn to tend to the thing it grows into. My curation and pruning and growing happened on the page. I won’t say that I beautified the bad things that happened to me, but they’re definitely more useful to me in this different shape.
BTR: There is a lot of light in these poems: searchlights, moonlight, light bulbs that get shut off by the city. The mother is associated with light and the brother with shadows, and the speaker often wields light, in search of the missing, the forgotten, the hiding. Is this the speaker carrying on his mother’s legacy, or doing a job all his own?
SED: The lights found their way into the book (for better or worse!) organically while drafting. I was often discouraged from writing into specific images and subject matter my teachers decided were cliché. Then, in grad school, my professor Marriane Boruch told us something like “Clichés are the only universal language.” I don’t know if that’s true—and I’ve become increasingly suspicious of absolutes—but it stuck with me.
It’s a challenge to make something new that is so familiar, but I think it’s our responsibility to wake language up in that way. I think that whenever poets write about the moon or the heart or light, etc., it feels like we’re tapping our finger on a really old microphone to see if it’s still on. We’re saying something like “I heard you yell about this thing. Do you hear me now yelling about this same thing?” It’s a way that we can time travel to affirm the past, air out the present, and make room for further possibility.
Steven Espada Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025). From East Los Angeles and 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 Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate.
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual, Puerto Rican writer. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Brittany is an alumna of the Fulbright Program and currently works as an Editorial and Administrative Assistant at Graywolf Press.
