Flop Era

Lara Egger is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It, which received the Juniper Prize for Poetry and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bennington Review, Conduit, The Southern Review,and elsewhere. Egger is the recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and her poems won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry. Egger lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.

'Are these feelings / faux fur or genuine leather?' asks one of the poems in this enchanting collection, which exhibits a keen attunement to the ways seduction can become destruction, language can become meaning, and delusion can become belief. Animated by an irreverent zaniness, Egger’s poetry fuses elements drawn from contemporary idiom and from lyric tradition to render a surreal world that interrogates existential questions about desire and grief. 'Truthfully, / I’m an imposter, deathly afraid / of heights,' she writes. 'One way to explain sorrow / is to assume / god never looks down.'