As with Vigor, As with Pain, a Review of Lara Egger’s “How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It”

Richard Hugo in his seminal essay “The Triggering Town” writes, “Most poets write the same poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be.” Lara Egger’s debut collection How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It amplifies Hugo’s point in her poetry about her desires failing to fuel and sustain connection.  Despite writing essentially the same poem, Egger has compiled a worthwhile collection through her playfully breaking down cliched, misheard, or misunderstood language into her own expressive language, especially over desire, and more pervasively through her poetic leaps of connection via her compressed, layered, associative style and her extended metaphors.

Unlike the range of desire from Li Young Lee’s sensuous love poems to Sharon Old’s eroticism, Egger’s poetry of desire accretes with compressed layers of language. At the same time, Egger literally pulls apart words, as in…