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writer feature: Laura Cesarco Eglin

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

Just a quick post to celebrate the publication of Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254) by Laura Cesarco Eglin.

Book cover for Time/Tempo by Laura Cesarco Eglin.

I had a chance to spend time with this collection pre-publication. Here’s the blurb I wrote:

Laura Cesarco Eglin’s Time/Tempo is a meditation on time unlike any other. Where time is often viewed as a limited resource, a reminder of our mortality and an immovable structure in our lives inevitably to be reckoned with, Eglin’s poems invite us into a deeper contemplation where one is asked to consider “What is left of me after I’ve left a place, after it has left me.” This visceral logic and sensibility make of time not only a companion but a dimension of self, and it is here where these poems most speak to the human experience. Eglin joins Emily Dickinson and Octavio Paz in her pursuit and engagement with what can be learned from the space between the ephemeral and everlasting. –José Angel Araguz, Ph.D., author of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press)

The poem below, “Learning Time,” embodies a number of the qualities I point out here. The poem starts off with a simple enough admission. The voice, however, continues building off the initial observation, eventually developing a meditation whose sense of intimacy lies somewhere between philosophy and diary. The result is a poem whose turns and logic feel both urgent and personal.

The ending of this poem is one of my favorite moments in the book. Cutting off mid-sentence on the word “Clouds” creates a jolt in the momentum of the poem which evokes the feeling the speaker has been lyricizing around. It is a moment at once tongue-in-cheek but also visceral, showing that humor and insight are born of the same material.

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Laura Cesarco Eglin

Learning Time

It rained yesterday and I missed it.

What happens simultaneously doesn’t
wait for witnesses and grows
in the air to then come down,
touch the trees at varying speeds
and leave the summer green a few
moments removed. That’s how
it rains again. Rain’s repeated, rain
is multiple and plural in its singularity.

Puddles in the parking lot say
there was a different picture moving
its way through a before. Clouds

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Copies of Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath by Laura Cesarco Eglin can be purchased from PRESS 254.

Be sure to check out this microreview & interview of one of Eglin’s earlier publications.

To learn more about Eglin’s work, check out her website.

writer feature: Kathleen Aguero

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

Kathleen Aguero

The Rider/The Horse

Fear saddled me, trained me,
stabled me, named me,
braided my hair.
Carrot and stick,
taught me to dance,
taught me to rear,
shod me and hobbled me,
bred me and pastured me,
cantered me, galloped me,
spurred me and drove me
out of the meadow
into the thicket,
out of the thicket
into the woods.
Fear held the bridle,
tightened the bit.
Fear was the master
brutal and quick,

but was I the horse?
Was I the rider?

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The above poem from Kathleen Aguero’s World Happiness Index (Tiger Bark Press) moves me in the way it interrogates Fear the concept through visceral means. This viscerality is evoked through the use of short phrasing and enjambment. Phrases are broken up, each line pulling the reader in one direction, only to shift to another direction in the next. The speaker describes the ride Fear takes them on, and we are there with them.

One of the more impactful moments is the jolt brought on by the rhyme toward the end of the last stanza. The way “bit” and “quick” play off each other sonically create an echo and imply an attempt at order after so many lines of chaos. This implied order is then upended by the final lines and their closing questions. These questions leave us wondering alongside the speaker, only we wonder and wander back to our lives to reflect, directly and indirectly, on the role of Fear in our lives.

Which is one way to work in that I’ve been living with fear myself these days. Not a new state, but one that keeps changing as folks become comfortable trying to convince themselves and others that we are moving on from the pandemic. This isn’t, of course, the case.

And yet, myself and others who are at risk, who are caregivers, who are disabled and on immunosuppressant medications, who are parents worried about their kids-jobs-sanity, who are at the mercy of a paycheck and are forced to place themselves at risk, we are having to navigate two realities: the one we know and the one being forced.

Hell, I just learned the phrase “endemic delusion,” which is a thing here and abroad.

Which brings me back to Aguero’s poem. How it underscores the ways in which fear can teach us things. And that it’s not fear that teaches but our surviving it, doing our own interrogation and work.

The jolts keep coming. If you’re reading this, I hope poems like this one and others steady you on your path.

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Copies of Kathleen Aguero’s World Happiness Index can be purchased from Tiger Bark Press.