Synopses & Reviews
Approach these poems as short stories, plainspoken lyric essays, controlled arcs of a bildungsroman, then again as narrative verse. Tap Out, Edgar Kunz’s debut collection, reckons with his working-poor heritage. Within are poignant, troubling portraits of blue-collar lives, mental health in contemporary America, and what is conveyed and passed on through touch and words?violent, or simply absent.
Yet Kunz’s verses are unsentimental, visceral, sprawling between oxys and Bitcoin, crossing the country restlessly. They grapple with the shame and guilt of choosing to leave the culture Kunz was born and raised in, the identity crises caused by class mobility. They pull the reader close, alternating fierce whispers and proud shouts about what working hands are capable of and the different ways a mind and body can leave a life they can no longer endure. This hungry new voice asks: after you make the choice to leave, what is left behind, what can you make of it, and at what cost?
Review
“This powerful collection reads like an elegy and a confession, like a slap to the face followed by a plaintive kiss, like watching bad things happen and knowing that you’re complicit. Yet cutting through every one of these essential poems is a gritty, naturalistic beauty that makes me want to read them again and again. Tap Out is a gem, and Edgar Kunz is a major talent.” Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long and Townie
Review
"There is no ground of existence that does not require (or fail to sustain) its poet. This proposition, requiring continual re-proving, has found again its confirmation in Edgar Kunz’s first book. In the lineage of Levine, Jordan, and Laux, Tap Out presents the data of blows received and taken in fully. Yet these poems do not return blow for blow; they offer instead an unflinching, continued allegiance to abiding connection. Without summation or comment, they remind us that all alchemies of being are possible. Kunz’s precision-tool language of memory and witness enlarges, pivots, pieces together the broken into a world made new, survivable, holdable, forgiven.” Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty and Come, Thief
Review
“The sustained lyricism of these poems is all the more powerful for being burned at the edges by memory, by grief, by regret. In terms of craft, this poetry creates a world where human action reaches language the way gravity bends starlight: in a drama of weight and light. This is a hard-pressed place, a territory of failed relationships and regions that never becomes landscape. As its reporter, Edgar Kunz lives up to its challenges and understands its limits. This is a wonderful first book, memorable and unsettling.” Eavan Boland, author of A Woman Without a Country
Review
“Tap Out is an ardent and gorgeous refusal to scorn the aches and wounds that bring us closer to mercy. Rippling with both sorrow and wonder, Edgar Kunz’s narratives sift through the intricacies of masculinity, working-class lives, and abandonment. The telling isn’t singed with nostalgia that obscures pain: his muscular lines make visible the scars that tether the self to hurt, to hope. The language is deftly scored on the page — the diction itself is revelatory. ShopRite. Larch. Chamber-throat. This book reminds us the heart has its own intelligence.” Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning
About the Author
Edgar Kunz was born and raised in New England. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the MacDowell Colony, Vanderbilt University, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches at Goucher College and in the MFA program at Salve Regina University.