Flop Era by Lara Egger

Flop Era by Lara Egger

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

Flop Era reckons with the complications of being human, and therefore, with the consequences of being fundamentally flawed. It contends with failed potential and the certain uncertainty of the future, while interrogating the past for clues that might explain why, as the speaker bemoans, “there are never enough nails in the coffin of poor choices.” While Egger throws confetti on the quotidian, she disarms the reader with earnestness and vulnerability. Rich in metaphor, affable and self-deprecating, the poems in Flop Era shine a spotlight on regret, infidelity, the feminine ideal, fear of death, and fear of insignificance.

Lara Egger is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It, which received the Juniper Prize for Poetry and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bennington Review, Conduit, The Southern Review,and elsewhere. Egger is the recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and her poems won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry. Egger lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.