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?

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.

"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?

“Egger has compiled a worthwhile collection through her playful breakdown of overused, misheard, or misunderstood language into her own expressive language—especially over desire—and more pervasively through her poetic leaps of connection.”—Robert Manaster, The Rumpus