Edgar Kunz
“I think most artists feel estranged from the world: it’s this distance that allows the world to come into focus. For me, writing poems is an attempt to see clearly, to make connections in a reality that often seems totally incoherent. The poems reach toward meaning, and they mostly don’t find it.”
“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.”
“Haunting...Reading Fixer, you can’t help thinking of Raymond Carver and the way that his blue-collar, stripped-to-the-bone style served as a corrective in the 1980s.”
“Affecting and lyrical…Kunz has written a beautiful collection about becoming ‘fixed,’ not just in the sense of repair but in the sense of finding a permanent home for oneself, even while recognizing that what’s best about one’s life can only be grasped in hindsight.”
“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.”
“Kunz crafts a poetics of disappointment and consolation...[the] poems are sparse and accessible, reminiscent of Hemingway in both content and style, and feature an extraordinary new voice that draws its energy from an underrepresented perspective.”
Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Fixer (Ecco, 2023), which the New York Times called, “haunting,” and Tap Out (Mariner, 2019), a New York Times New & Noteworthy Pick that was described by The Washington Post as 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. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and American Poetry Review.
In an interview with The Adroit Journal about his first book, Tap Out, Kunz discussed what he was writing towards in these poems: “I hope the book is insisting on the dignity of every person, resisting the flattening out. I mean, we’re living in the age of social media. If you’re not actively doing the work to get your brain back into the mode of thinking about the relationships between things as complex, then it’s easy to just skate across the surface of your life. That puts us in a really precarious position as a culture. So I hope the poems are insisting that every human being is complex, that every situation might be more complicated than we think at first. Even our own emotional realities. If you do a little bit of digging, what’s actually happening isn’t only what's most apparent.”
Kunz grew up in New England, He received his MFA from Vanderbilt University. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.
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(c) Ariana Mygatt
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