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National Poetry Month: Edgar Kunz

About Blog Post Apr 12, 2024 by SCLSNJ Staff
National Poetry Month: Edgar Kunz   Created by Bob Helmbrecht, collection development librarian Our National Poetry Month poet for today is Edgar Kunz. Kunz's debut collection, "Tap Out," was published in 2019 by Ecco Press. It received many great reviews, and was the winner of the 2019 Nautilus Book Gold Award for Poetry. From the publisher's description: "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." Poet Eavan Boland said of it: "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." Kunz's next collection was 2023's "Fixer," also published by Ecco Press. From the publisher's description: "Temp jobs, conspiracy theories, squatters, talk therapy, urban gardening, the robot revolution: this collection fixes its eye on the strangeness of labor, through poems that are searching, keen, and wry." Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss said of the collection: "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." You can find several of Kunz's poems and essays on the author's website. Read a few, then check out "Fixer" and "Tap Out" today!
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