“Haunting…
Kunz doesn’t flinch.”
“An arresting vision buoyed
by Kunz’s wry wit.”
“Stunningly beautiful…
Unsparing yet buoyant.”
“Affecting and lyrical…Kunz has written a beautiful book.”
"It is difficult to describe Edgar Kunz’s Fixer without engaging in the superlatives that the book’s own ethos would defy, without swarming the page with adjectives that seem to oppose each other, but somehow, in Fixer, do not. Elegant, raw. Romantic, deadpan cynical. Lushly erotic and spare. Informal in diction but perfectly artful in structure and craft. Fixer is a book of work. Of the ludicrous jobs we do to stay almost-afloat. Glass cutter. Gas station model. Dip taster. The addictive, Sisyphean work of hunting for work, enacted in clean syntax that cuts to the chase and the bone. The weird labor of loss. Even of gain. I find myself bonded to the unheroic hero of these poems, whose world and character are as sustained and convincing as the protagonist’s in a novel I can’t shake. I know these feelings—of failing oneself, failing and being failed by others, losing a parent who was already lost, and sustaining oneself via desire, and even love. Maybe it fails the book to call it a masterpiece, but it’s all I’ve got."
Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets,
winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
"Edgar Kunz is the real deal. Hard-nosed, hard-edged, and hard on his craft, he first caught us slipping with Tap Out–and now, before we could fully recover, he’s followed up with the haymaker that is Fixer. Story, lyric, tight rhythms and taut lines. Intellect, heart. It’s all here. Fans of Philip Levine, Denis Johnson, or Dorianne Laux will find in these poems reason to smile—even through tears—knowing that the tradition of the working class American lyric is in strong hands. This book is a god damned knock out."
John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry
"I am deeply moved by Edgar Kunz’s second collection, Fixer. Entirely surprising, the poems move from rumination to revelation, from devastation to determination, in effusive and masterful strokes. Fixer is a gospel of American truths, weighted by complex circumstances and freed by the imagination. A remarkable book by a poet who continues to shine with tender and lyrical precision."
Tina Chang, author of Hybrida
“A gritty, insightful debut.”
“Charts the physical terrain
of blue-collar masculinity.”
“A whirlwind debut.”
“An extraordinary new voice.”
Edgar Kunz’s startling debut Tap Out is one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a long time. These poems interrogate what is received and what is bequeathed in our damaged systems of masculinity, and they do so in ways that are unexpectedly vulnerable. At the same time, the poems are onomatopoeia of humility and busted machismo. It’s as if the poems themselves are surprised by how much harm has been done, how much energy and emotion have been expended simply surviving inside of our toxic patriarchy. Fathers are complicit. Friends and brothers are complicit. The speaker is complicit, too, and yet the poems do their vital work without soapboxing. They search constantly for better ways of being human. These are essential poems.”
Adrian Matejka, author of Map to the Stars and The Big Smoke
“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
“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 become 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 and A Poet’s Dublin
“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, his narratives sift through the intricacies of masculinity, working class lives, and abandonment. The telling isn’t singed with nostalgia that obscures pain: his finely-wrought lines make visible the scars that tether the self to hurt, to hope. The poems are deftly scored on the page—the diction itself is revelatory. ShopRite. Larch. Chamber-throat. Edgar Kunz’s debut reminds us the heart has its own intelligence.”
Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine
“Edgar Kunz extends the legacy of James Wright and Philip Levine in these gutsy, tough-minded, working-class poems of memory and initiation. Tap Out is a marvelous debut, a well-made and harrowing book.”
Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel and A Poet’s Glossary
“It hurts to read these poems and I think it hurt to write them.”
Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain”
“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 Townie and House of Sand and Fog