Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles and lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate. His poems “Waiter Park” and “Caldera” appeared in the Rehoming Remarkable Work issue of Variant Lit in Winter 2022.
Steven’s debut poetry collection, Late to the Search Party—in which Steven contemplates this grief for his dying mother who raised him, his absent father, and his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade—has recently been published by Simon & Schuster and is available to order now.
This interview was conducted over email in May 2025 between Emma Smith and Steven Espada Dawson. It has been edited and arranged for clarity and length.
Emma Smith: Late to The Search Party is set between Los Angeles and Colorado – how do you feel these two settings shape the emotional landscape of the collection?
Steven Espada Dawson: In Colorado, my mom always joked that we took L.A. with us, as if we had it hidden in a duffle bag. What she meant, I think, is that we were leaving home. When you’re someone caught between two places it can be hard to know whether that carrying is a life vest or a haunting. There’s a poem in the collection called “Homesick Sonnet” that ends: “What sounds follow you / away from home? All of them. You left. All of them.” I think there’s a connection there.
When writing about my brother and mother—people caught at the fringes of life and death—I find a lot of resonance in the spaces of transition. Some of my favorite places in the world are hotels and gas stations for that reason. Both of those spaces of in-between are present in the book.
ES: The first poem – ‘A River is a Body Running’ – is a stunning and unsettling introduction to the collection. The line ‘I whittle that used syringe into an instrument only I can play’ feels like a guiding metaphor for the entire book. Why did you decide to set this poem apart from the collection’s four-part structure?
SED: There’s an incredible anthology called Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance, edited by Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis. In the intro, Kaveh writes, “The shadow of addiction is almost always larger than the life of the addict.”
I write about my brother’s heroin addiction and disappearance, and I write about my mother’s terminal illness, but I am not a heroin addict; I am not disappeared; and I am not terminally ill. I own the witnessing, the instrument, the song but not necessarily the notes. When writing about family, I think it’s important to be clear about what’s yours and what’s theirs.
ES: Speaking of structure, why did you feel it was important to split the collection into four parts? Was this inspired by the “four chambers of a heart” motif, or did the structure emerge in another way?
SED: I did decide to arrange the book into four “chambers” pretty early on in the project. A heart is a muscle that empties and fills itself again and again, so I wanted to borrow that organic architecture. Those elegies, too, feel like a pulse check that helped me order the collection. The title poem is in four parts for the same reason.
In poetry, things in fours—like stanzas with four lines—are sometimes considered the slowest because they don’t build forward momentum as quickly as other arrangements. They thrive on symmetry, which can be counterintuitive to movement. When elegies are the coal that powers the engine, I’m also thinking about how to slow things down, so fours felt right.
ES: ‘Waiter Park’ is a poem that masterfully captures both a sense of place and the complexities of brotherhood – I was struck by the juxtaposition of the slushies drunk outside the gas station and Brian’s heroin trade. An earlier iteration of this poem was published in Variant. Could you walk us through the changes you made to the poem and how these revisions helped situate it within the larger arc of the collection?
SED: That poem is the only prose poem in the collection, so in that way it calls a lot of attention to itself. I worked it over with my brilliant editor, Kathy Belden, but the revisions were mostly just sanding down the rough corners and making the ending a little punchier.
I think “Waiter Park” travels as abrasively as it can feel to love an addict. You have movements of mess and confusion followed immediately by profound tenderness. Those emotions are not necessarily in contradiction but part of the same pendulum.
ES: ‘Caldera’ is another poem previously published in Variant and perhaps one of the most devastating pieces in the collection. Can you talk about how you shaped the poem into its final form, particularly the decision to write in tercets and the powerful enjambment (“Mom says Brian doesn’t have a heart / worth hating…”)?
SED: “Caldera,” for me, is one of the angriest poems in the book. Anger is a difficult emotion to write through because it’s one of those feelings that can be a little too sure of itself. Poetry is a negotiation with certainty, and anger can feel too certain sometimes. No room for the reader. Certainty is for resumes and brochures.
I wrote that poem after attending a friend’s poetry salon that involved an altar. We were talking about whom or what we’d summon here if we could. My guttural answer was my brother, and I was upset about that at the time (and now, writing this). So I wanted to embed that feeling into the piece—that intersection of longing and anger.
Tercets are off-center and propulsive. They’re my first stanza love. I used them to speed the poem up so that the monostich of the last line “away, I break the line like a femur” lands harder. I’ve heard some folks call this poem an ars poetica, and that makes sense to me.
ES: Who are some of the poets that inspire you? I notice the first poem in Part One references another Wisconsin poet, b: william bearhart. Why is his work important to you?
SED: I borrow the first line of his poem “On Being Suicidal” as the title for my poem “When the Body Says No but You Can’t Stop Swallowing.” b shares my brother’s name. Like me, he struggled with suicidal ideation for much of his life, and that familiar feeling rang like a beautiful, undeniable bell in his poems. I learned in 2020 that he didn’t make it. I never got the chance to tell him he was one of my favorite poets, and I really regret that. I included that poem as a bell for others struggling, and—because he was someone I was always surprised didn’t already have a book—I wanted to make sure his name was printed on the page.
ES: Lastly, this collection is filled with brilliant, evocative titles. Why did you choose Late to the Search Party as the titular poem, and how does it express or encapsulate the heart of the book?
SED: I have to give all credit to my partner who first threw that title into the short list. I ultimately decided on it because I feel it captures those competing textures of humor and seriousness that I tried to make palpable throughout the book. I also think it represents how the processing of grief works. It’s easy to feel “late” to it because it can take a lot of time.
The title poem was the last one added to the collection. I included it after the book had already been accepted for publication. I realized that I didn’t explicitly answer the question “do you want your brother back?” after being asked that by a well-meaning audience member after a reading. I revisited an old draft I’d been trying to get right for a couple of years that comes closest to answering that question. It was the kind of poem that came together in two years and two weeks, and, if anything, that pause is a little affirmation that I chose the right title.
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The son of a Mexican immigrant, Steven Espada Dawon 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: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance. Late to the Search Party is out now!
