Almost sweetly, the judge gaveled away my summer,knocking her desk lightly like a quiet neighbor’s door.I worked three hundred hours at a Salvation Army—their motto Blood and Fire. Our small misfit militia,teenagers unearthing ourselves among the stacksof orphaned objects, piecemeal Lego sets, doll houseswith missing balconies. Some people would donateanything for a write-off: prosthetic limbs, uncle’s ashesmistaken for a daisy vase, countless dildos, dildoes, dildi.I learned the Spanish word—consolador, from to console.We took fishing pictures with the biggest and brightest,threw them in a box we hid from managementlike a pile of armless crosses. Bad cadavers,sometimes they’d shiver back to life.
Salvation Sonnet
Steven Espada Dawson
Feature Date
- June 8, 2025
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“Salvation Sonnet” from LATE TO THE SEARCH PARTY: by Steven Espada Dawson.
First published in The Adroit Journal.
Published by Scribner Books on May 6, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Steven Espada Dawson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Taylor Kirby
Taylor Kirby
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 Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart 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.
"Late to the 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 the 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
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