POETRY/POESÍA
Between Gone and Leaving—Home
dancing girl press, 2023
In Between Gone and Leaving—Home, Laura Cesarco Eglin keenly observes the transformational potential between languages, held and felt in a body, as a circuitous flow of meanings. These linguistically alert poems invite us to linger in that interstitial space where “any singularity is not enough to hold so much.”
—Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, author of Interrogation Room
Available at dancing girl press
Time / Tempo: The Idea of Breath
PRESS 254, 2022
In Laura Cesarco Eglin’s stunning Time / Tempo: The Idea of Breath, space and time converse through the author’s breath, so that narrative makes meaning through its very evanescence. Memories exist not as recollections of moments gone but as indelible markers of space, a kind of translation of the physical into the temporal. “The house is empty except for July 8th,” Cesarco Eglin writes. And “that’s a way of focusing on the degrees / that separate absence from presence—degrees / that show how far away from home / home became.” What a striking meditation on the very meaning of consciousness.
—Lauren Shapiro, author of Arena
Available at PRESS 254
Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals
Thirty West Publishing House, 2020
On the surface, the poems in Laura Cesarco Eglin’s Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals deal with the poet’s multiple bouts with cancer, and the need for each of us to face our wounds head-on, to “touch the stitches” and feel “the texture that transforms the hand.” Yet on a deeper level, these taut, fearless, and complex poems celebrate the ways that pain can make us more present to this one life, which is “the disarray in a bouquet,” jumbled, wild, messy—and ours. This book, overflowing with hard-won wisdom, reminds us over and over that to resist reality is to cause ourselves far more suffering than we need to, “when letting go will be quiet/and enough.”
—James Crews, editor of Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection
To order the chapbook email me at laura.cesarcoeglin@gmail.com
Reborn in Ink / Volver en tinta
Trans. Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval
The Word Works, 2019
These poems excel in the art of astonishing transformation. Lipstick becomes a remembrance of the selection line of life versus death in the Holocaust. An eyelash becomes the site of all hope, glued to the chest, and brushing hair turns into a chance to learn “eccentricity in community.” These beautiful translations seem to know their own irresistibility, as they capture the poet’s understanding that her work will be translated: “these tears that escape translation/ but are in fact translated as I say—Help me.” It may be simpler to call this book Uruguayan poetry or Jewish poetry, but it is more accurate to say, here is Laura Cesarco Eglin, a poet of eyelashes, hopes, and the world itself.
—Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible
Available at The Word Works and
Calling Water by Its Name / Llamar al agua por su nombre
Trans. Scott Spanbauer
Mouthfeel Press, 2016.
Into orange blossoms, dancing castanets, clouding sandscapes, Laura Cesarco Eglin weaves dreamy memories of a rioplatense childhood and a maturing poet’s understanding of language’s ability to make, unmake, and remake the world. While “all that remains of the sand / is the word handful,” Cesarco Eglin keeps language fresh — woodsing, outjugated, underbay—and her imaginative leaps teach us “how to live our death” and how to live with insistent longing: “Rewinding moments / in the shadow of later because / when I say enough it’s already gone.” Through Scott Spanbauer’s deft and daring translations, English speakers now have a chance to experience one of Uruguay’s loveliest emerging voices.
—Ron Salutsky, author of Romeo Bones
Available at Mouthfeel Press
Occasions to Call Miracles
The Lune series, 2015
“Cesarco Eglin measures time in sound, color, and curling, maps memory in wilting and tension, and exposes the nonlinear nature of hours. She calls out our futile addiction to naming, how our words reach ceaseless toward the thing and fall short. But Cesarco Eglin reminds us the real poem is right there in that reaching—in the aperture eyelid between dream and awake, in the threshold conjuring. At the end of this manuscript ‘you will not know your initials', and that's the liberation Cesarco Eglin offers so graciously. Open these pages and ‘let yourself feel wet at the shore' of her verse."
—Ellie Swensson
To order the chapbook email me at laura.cesarcoeglin@gmail.com
Sastrería
Yaugurú, 2011
La memoria clava su punta en la tela, la entretela, la tela. Sale del lado de adentro, respira como un bañista toma aliento y vuelve a hundir la aguja en la memoria. En cada una de las capas de la memoria, pincha la tela del texto. El ritmo es preciso, entra y sale y entra. La confección es ajustada. Laura Cesarco Eglin se ha propuesto entallar el desastre de la desmemoria. Tiene, ante tal tarea, que coser cada una de las partes. La hechura del poema finalmente no deja hilacha a la vista, pero por dentro todos los hilos laten, están vivos y dan la firmeza exterior.
—Gustavo (Maca) Wojciechowski
To order the book email me at laura.cesarcoeglin@gmail.com
Available at Finishing Line Press
Tailor Shop: Threads
Co-translated with Teresa Williams
Finishing Line Press, 2013.
In these translations, Laura Cesarco Eglin writes, "I face myself with the other/ in my memory" and "sing with everything I have." And we hear in this fierce voice that calls to history—and to the mirror—a deep desire to piece together, through the recuperative powers of language, what has been lost or altered through exile, tragedy, everyday losses. But there is also, in these poems, the transformative powers of love for family and the beauty of the mundane.
—Rosa Alcalá, author of MyOTHER TONGUE