Overview

Break a Part by Laura Cesarco Eglin explores how breaking (up and off) is a complex enterprise that involves breaking apart, breaking a part, being in part and partly-sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. These poems examine the pieces that are still whole, the parts we focus on to define a whole with all the pieces, with some, with a reconfiguration of parts and the involvement of new components. In other words, Break a Part breaks down what is alive and in language. It dives into breaking into language. It is precisely in the grappling with language(s) that one can name the parts and their connections.

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Reviews

Part of being in the present moment is constantly feeling ""the exhilaration of about to,"" or so the poetic speaker in Laura Cesarco Eglin's Break a Part teaches. In Cesarco Eglin's meandering and meditative poems, readers are invited to interrogate what we think we know about time, distance, language, space, directionality, and liminality, all of which are mediated by how we perceive our relationships to an array of particular othernesses. If a word, then, is a ""contract with all its letters"" to hold together in a particular moment amid the vastness of the negative space that surrounds, then Break a Part reveals how writing as creation-as an act of involvement and engagement within the instance of these concepts and realms-frames a disparate totality, a kind of hardscrabble love of becoming, even as it contains so much shattering, heartbreak, and hurt. Cesarco Eglin's poems provide us with a different way to tell that familiar story-the one where breaking is not simply fragmentation, disintegration, individuation, or loss, but provides insight into how we can perceive and articulate relationships to the composition, the collective, the whole that seems so elusive. -Steve Halle, author of Cow Stomach and Mother Fat Laura Cesarco Eglin's poetry is a realm where ""tentacles of translation"" reach for discovery and ""slanted realities."" Taut yet languid with yearning and ""verbs that linger,"" these poems seek ""collective meaning,"" even as they ruminate on particular heartbreak. A meditation both diffuse and cutting, Break a Part, is also about the limits of language, the possibilities of other articulations, and the tensions between expectation and reality. Here, a word is a ""contract with all its letters,"" and ""wonder / is one more way to go / about the woods."" In this deft and elegant collection, Cesarco Eglin does the difficult work of confronting illusion, while leaving ""room for figuring out."" -Tina Cane, author of Year of the Murder Hornet

Author Information

Laura Cesarco Eglin is the author of six collections of poetry, including the chapbook Between Gone and Leaving-Home (dancing girl press, 2023). She is the translator of claus and the scorpion by the Galician author Lara Dopazo Ruibal (co-im-press, 2022), longlisted for both the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. Cesarco Eglin is also the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co-im-press), winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. Her latest translation is Sardine by the Galician poet Miriam Reyes (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2026). Cesarco Eglin is the publisher of Veliz Books.

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