ThirtyWest
Publishing House, 2020
I started reading Laura Cesarco
Eglin’s chapbook Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals in a doctor’s
office waiting room. This felt fitting, as Cesarco Eglin’s poems in this volume
focus on her experiences battling skin cancer. Poem titles like “Melanoma’s
Lines,” “Waiting for Biopsy Results,” “Recovery,” and “Articulating the Changes
in My Body” emphasize this context, and poems reference “my cancer” (13) and
“the stitches” (11). The cover image, what we might initially perceive as a
purple abstract, is actually a detail from “Malignant Melanoma,” a textbook depiction
of cancerous cells. Reading this thoughtfully articulate chapbook about the
failures of a body—while I was wearing a mask, sitting socially distanced in a
waiting room, trying not to touch anything—made me feel more acutely aware of
my own body’s relationships to physical health and the rooms it was inhabiting.
Impressively, the lyric poems here are
able to locate beauty in “my scar… still red and / tender” (7). Cesarco Eglin identifies the poetic “rhythm”
of “biopsy, surgery, biopsy, surgery, biopsy, surgery” (9) and draws her
readers in. She invites us to think about what it means to live in a body whose
exterior is painful, unpredictable, and perhaps uncontrollable. The speaker in
these poems describes surgeries and doctor office visits: “I smelled myself
being burned” (8), she writes; “My skin [crawls] out / from under me, away, /
like leather on my body” (16). But our narrator is more than just a body, and
mind and body are necessarily connected through these poems. The speaker is
able to create agency over her physical body, comparing new scars to “tattoos” or
“landmarks” and “wondering about the length / and shape of my next scar” (19).
Melanoma’s scars are ultimately poetry; they are “two lines,” “a couplet that
promises / to be the beginning of a lifetime” (8)
While Cesarco Eglin’s poems in Life
are about cancer, they are also often about language, origins, and fitting
in. The speaker in these poems articulates the literal problem of skin and
body, but she examines issues of language and divergence as well, pointing out “the
silence / of the H in Spanish that makes all the difference” (12). The narrator, recognizing “I haven’t lived
there all my life— / there is still apart” (16), is always living in a
sort of highlighted translation. But she doesn’t hide from difference; instead,
she emphasizes it: “I choose my sentences carefully to be able to / use as many
words with written accents as I can” (20). Connecting the idea of explicitly
claiming variance through speech and habits, she recognizes her skin may
similarly be “having its revolution, / demanding a seat at the table” (16).
Through a combination of prose poems
and more lyric meditations, Life charts the journey of cancer from
doctor appointments to fresh scars, from biopsies to surgeries, from sunblock to
watchful care. Then, surprisingly and gratefully, “you are done” (30). In this collection
Cesarco Eglin achieves her desire to “make real mean / something” (12).
Her poems reveal the myriad ways that unexpected painful changes invite us to better
examine relationships with our bodies and other surroundings. We are reminded
that, though we may find our bodies in waiting rooms, on examination tables, or
otherwise beyond our control, we should still allow ourselves to be “fascinated
by the analysis” (19). Reading this chapbook, we are encouraged to recognize
and even welcome the fact that “After all, today is the disarray in a bouquet”
(31).
Genevieve Kaplan
is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books, 2020), In the ice house (Red
Hen, 2011), and three chapbooks. She lives in southern California where she
edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary
translations of poetry and prose. Find her online at
https://genevievekaplan.com.