Flop Era

. . .one thought leading to another, with the reader trying to keep up with her, make the connections, savoring the ride. It’s charming, in the way a snake-charmer hypnotizes a cobra.

In Lara Egger’s Flop Era, the familiar is always teetering into the unfamiliar, but even more exciting is the way the unfamiliar tips into something palpable and all the more disquieting. ‘Have you ever asked your doctor / if Ennui ® is right for you?’ she asks. These are poems of surprise that demand a reader feel the presence of a vivid and thinking mind. Egger offers us not just elegance but an emotional connection to a speaker who is ‘something winged awash in a glass.’

Modern poetry readers who have ever thought, ‘The future is best observed from a Ferris wheel,’ will find Lara Egger’s hair-trigger, rapid-fire associations in Flop Era full of hard-won truths like ‘darkness doesn’t fall, but rises’; the pull of her poems taking readers for a satisfying and surprising carnival ride above the quotidian to glimpse the extraordinary.

Flop Era is filled with poems of stunning impact. These are fast-talking, wise-cracking, and, at the same time, heartfelt works in which Lara Egger’s inventive use of language is evident in almost every line. ‘My imagination’s fluent,’ she writes, and we see that claim borne out in the way she synthesizes angst and anguish with humor and intelligence. We wind up with hot-wired poems of striking complexity. A terrific collection!

Lara Egger’s Flop Era is constantly surprising, a feverish consciousness issuing impressions at breakneck speed, the confessional poem as a testing ground in which the associative-surreal (a compound word I was forced to invent for Egger’s work alone) becomes a baseline for reality, something the speaker cannot quite decide whether to accept or reject. Also: Is it me or everyone else? she asks. Egger’s poems are full of volatility and hunger, invention and wisdom, humor and wit, evasion and honesty. It’s high-voltage stuff—sometimes sexy, sometimes heartbreaking—for sure. You’ll likely read Flop Era straight through and keep it in your to-reread pile for months, years...