Tap Out: Poems – Julia Ward Howe Award Winner: Gritty Narrative Verse on Heritage, Shame, and Class Mobility - Softcover

Kunz, Edgar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1328518124 ISBN 13: 9781328518125

Publisher: Ecco, 2019

Synopsis

"Charts the gritty, physical terrain of blue-collar masculinity."―New York Times New & Noteworthy
 “Kunz arrives with real poetic talent.”—The Millions, “Must Read Poetry”

"[A] gritty, insightful debut." —Washington Post

Winner of the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award for Poetry

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? 

About this title

About the Author

Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer (Ecco, 2023), a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, and Tap Out (Ecco, 2019), which the Washington Post called “a gritty insightful debut.” He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poetry, and American Poetry Review. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

After the Hurricane
 
                                                                  Three hundred
 
miles north, my father beds down in a van by the Connecticut River.
Snow tires rim-deep in the silt. He has a wool horse blanket
 
tacked inside the windshield. A pair of extra pants bunched
into a pillow. He has a paper bag of partially smoked butts.
 
A Paw Sox cap. A Zippo. He has state-sponsored cell phone minutes
 and a camo jacket hung on the sideview to dry. He can see the Costco
 
parking lot through the trees. Swelling and emptying out. He wants
to fix things with his wife. He wants a couch to crash on.
 
He wants a drink. He wants sex. He has a few cans of kidney beans
and a tin of ShopRite tuna. Wrinkled plastic piss bottles line the dash.
 
Sometimes he walks out to the river and lets the wind sift his lank
and matted hair. Sometimes he peels his socks and stands
 
in the murky current and thinks about his wife. The birthmark
on her neck. Her one toe longer than the others. Her freckled hands.
 
He tries to hold her hands in his mind. He tries to remember
the birth years of his sons. He tries to make sense of the papers
 
he signed. The icy water wetting the hem of his pants. The river stones
sharp underfoot. The wind. I hold him like this in my mind
 
all afternoon.
 

_________________________________________________________


In the Supply Closet at Illing Middle
 
Mike pins me to the sink, forearm
                levered against my throat, flexing
                                the needle-nose pliers in one hand.
 
He and Ant examine the hole in my head
                where the pencil lead snapped off, blood
                                leaking down my temple
 
and pooling in my ear. I squirm
                and Mike presses harder. Hold still.
                                I know how to do this.
 
I know what he means: our fathers
                used to salvage wrecks in Mike's sideyard.
                                Hammer out the paneling,
 
clean the fouled spark plugs
                with spit. Flip them for cash or drive them
                                until the transmission seized.
 
If they didn't know where
                one came from, they pulled it
                                into the garage, sold it off quick.
 
Now, Ant stands lookout
                in the doorway. Half-watching
                                for teachers and half-watching Mike,
 
who rinses my hair
                with floor cleaner thick
                                as motor oil. Eases my head
 
toward the weak light
                of the pull-chain bulb. Presses
                                the pliers to my skull, and starts to dig.
 


 
Free Armchair, Worcester
 
He pinches the j between his first two fingers squints an eye against the ribbon of smoke sliding up and over his cheekbone. It's me my buddy Ant and Ant's stepdad Randy a half-ass house painter who's always trying to hit us up for weed or pills even though we're thirteen and don't do pills or have any idea how to get them. We're driving Randy's work van into Worcester to pick up a recliner he found in the free section of the Globe. Ant hates his guts and I don't like him much either but Ant's always doing stuff for me like asking his mom if I can stay the night or sneaking me empanadas when my dad doesn't come home so I go along Ant up front me in the back bracing myself against the wheelwells trying not to get knocked around too bad. Randy pulls up in front of the house and we try stuffing the armchair in the back but the arms are too wide. We flip it on one end heave it onto the roof. Lash it down with a tangle of rope from the glovebox and step back. It's not a bad-looking chair. Fabric ratty at the edges but sturdy. Mostly clean. Randy twists another j to celebrate and buys us sandwiches. We post up in an Arby's parking lot the three of us cracking jokes Randy belting folk songs in Spanish. Recliner strapped to the van like a prize buck. He flicks the roach into the weeds says but you skinny-asses you little faggots you could barely lift it and we stop laughing. I look over at Ant and he's sort of picking at his jeans face tight like he got caught doing something dumb like he's ashamed or something and for a second it's like what's gonna happen has already happened. Like the rope's already snapped the armchair gone headlong into the road behind us. Like we're pulled off on the shoulder Randy punching the wheel calling us dumbfucks fuckheads sons-of-bitches sending us out to wait for a lull in traffic and drag the wreckage to the median. Like we've already started to say what we'll say over and over: We knew the whole time. Chair was too heavy. Rope too frayed. Too thin. Nah we knew. No shit we knew. You think we're stupid?

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1328518124
• ISBN 13: 9781328518125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112