How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It

by Lara Egger

Overview

Winner of Ploughshares’ 2022 John C. Zacharis First Book Award
Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo, the over in lover? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625345714
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	04/30/2021
Series:	Juniper Prize for Poetry
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

LARA EGGER is a Boston-based poet. The recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize, and a two-time Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, the Laurel Review, Washington Square Review, Salt Hill, The Pinch, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

Dead Reckoning 1

A New New Guide 2

The Igneous Hours 3

Driving Lessons 4

Eleven Days in Alicante 5

S.O.S. 7

Wanderlust 8

The One-Hit Wonders 9

If You're Anything like Me 10

A New New Guide to Heredity 11

Stille Nacht 12

Drunkest Etc. 13

At Washington Square Tavern 14

The Bridge between Us 15

Museum of the Heart 16

Another Version of My Confession 18

A New New Guide to Lunar Ambulation 19

Every Promise Eventually Sounds like an Apology 20

Boy George Is My Spirit Animal 21

The Pillow Book 23

Because I Am Stuck in My Own Syntax 25

The Lovemaking Habits of Icebergs 26

My Desire Is an Orchestra That Only Knows One Song 27

Kiss Me and You Will See How Important You Are 28

The Mondegreen 29

A New New Guide to Irony 30

The January of Having Everything 31

The Persuasion 32

The Accident 33

Sure, I Took the Pamphlet on Breaking Bad Habits 34

Charades 35

In Flagrante 36

A New New Guide to Root Vegetables 37

Mutual Disambiguation 38

In Our Garden of Eden 39

The Prophecy 40

Please Don't Leave Me Unattended 41

How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It 42

A New New Guide to Entropy 43

We All Get Turned Around 44

In My Wandering Circus of Desire 45

Vanishing Points of Arrival 46

Sanguine 47

Sweet Girl 48

A New New Guide to Self-Help 49

Weapons of Probable Destruction 50

Having Said That 51

Tell Me the One about the Marxist with a Horse Named Trotsky 52

Delivery by Mouth 54

The Flightless Birds 55

Because There's No Emoji for Memory 56

Appassionata Sonata & Other Works for Solo Piano 57

Death Mask 58

58 Don't Stay, Don't Go 59

A New New Guide to Husbandry 60

Whistling Dixie 61

Mixed Messages 62

Plasticity Theory 63

Bloom Box Ode 64

Poem Beginning with a Sentence by Dean Young 65

A New New Guide to Mobility 66

Souvenir 67

Coin-Toss Theories 68

All Such Intimacies 69

Poem in Defense 70

Know This 71

With These Wings 72

Notes 73

Acknowledgments 75

Editorial Reviews

"Headlong, agile, volatile, Lara Egger's poems crackle with collision and invention. They shoot the divide between unsayable and unknowable. They 'traipse the vast / in devastation.' It's a thrill to discover her work."—James Haug, author of Riverain

"Lara Egger has created her own version of the confessional poem with language that performs on a trapeze. Her poems will stun you and break your heart."—Rick Bursky, author of Let's Become a Ghost Story

"Beating inside Lara Egger's chest is a beast of pathologic geometry. She cries and curses, begs and screams, and laughs it over the cliff. She refuses to love and die alone, will not ever judge you, will gladly swap all of your jaded conceits for a few hardy knocks of messy wonder. If you're feeling lucky, say yes to her eternal burning questions. Say yes to all of them."—Barrett Warner, author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?

From the Publisher