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

“Charts the gritty, physical terrain of blue-collar masculinity.”―New York Times New & Noteworthy

“[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?

• Blue-Collar Masculinity: From wrestling matches that leave weeping wounds to the silent codes passed down between working hands, these poems map the raw and often troubling terrain of manhood.
• Narrative Poetry: Each poem tells a story—of salvaging wrecked cars, of a house fire's aftermath, of a graduation attended by a drunken father—with the plainspoken clarity of a lyric essay.
• Class Mobility: A visceral look at the guilt and identity crises that come with leaving home, grappling with the shame of having "piano hands" in a world of calloused knuckles.
• Bildungsroman in Verse: Follow a young man's journey out of a New England town of dead-end jobs and family trauma, and witness the cost of choosing a different life.

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.