Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals
Thirty West Publishing House
$11.99
You can buy the book here.
Reviewed by Brooke Palma
In Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals, Laura Cesarco Eglin shows the reader that tragedy can give birth to beauty. This moving testimony chronicles Eglin’s multiple bouts of melanoma through impactful poems. Each poem confronts the messy beauty of life and explores the ways that the sublime is connected to the body itself.
The connection between language and the experiences of the body is a theme that echoes throughout this chapbook. The second poem in this collection, “Melanoma’s Lines” masterfully elaborates on this connection. As Eglin writes in this poem’s final stanza,
One scar, then another;
that's two lines already:
a couplet written in five months,
a couplet that promises
to be the beginning of a lifetime
of poetry.
Eglin uses her experience of illness to go beyond the merely emotional. Her illness drives her poetry, and more so than that, through this book, it becomes poetry. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could become a trite attempt to draw sympathy from the reader, but Eglin’s writing is raw and visceral. She does not shy away from the hard truths of the experience, and that is what makes these poems so beautiful and so compelling. She lets us in to the difficult truths about “a tongue’s job in poetry, letting the body participate” and to the fact that “[t]here’s so much in being silent” …to “touch the stitches with your hands.” By facing the pain head-on without anesthetic for herself or us as readers, she transforms the negative experience of chronic illness into something brutal and beautiful.
Eglin not only captures the physical aspects of illness, but she writes honestly of the emotional difficulties as well, specifically the anxiety of waiting and uncertainty. In “Journeys,” she describes “the anxiety of about to.” She tells us that melanoma has a similar rhythm to the subway’s impending arrival described in this poem: … “biopsy, surgery, biopsy, surgery, biopsy, surgery. It’s always coming — always somewhere …” In “Perspective,” she writes of a past when she imagined “cancer as a broken promise.” The poem that perhaps best captures this uncertainty is “Waiting for Biopsy Results.” She explains,
…Murmur is what has been unfolding
already existing by the time I notice it,
already moving towards ungraspable, already
inside and growing.
Murmur is not quite late,
but almost. Murmur is a diagnosis
away from surgery, away from being
vigilant all the time…
The sound pattern in the repetition of the word “murmur” mirrors the whispered worry, the constant anxiety brewing just below the surface. In this poem, Elgin brings us along to wait and worry alongside her.
Laura Cesarco Eglin’s Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals, births beauty out of tragedy and poetry out of struggle. This chapbook explores the body’s connection to language. The hard-hitting images show the difficult emotional and physical impacts of the author’s melanoma diagnosis; this in turn helps disrupt our certainty in everyday life. At the same time, these same images remind us that there is poetry in suffering, and Eglin works to turn the ugly into the beautiful.
Brooke Palma grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Many of her poems focus on the connections between culture and identity and finding beauty in the everyday. Her work has been published in The Mad Poets’ Review, Moonstone Arts, Toho Journal, and E-Verse Radio (online), and work is forthcoming in Unbearables: A Global Anthology (to be released on November 2, 2020). Her chapbook, Conversations Unfinished, was published by Moonstone Press in August 2019. She hosts the Livin’ on Luck Poetry Series at Barnaby’s West Chester.