Fixer

Kunz's outstanding second collection, following Tap Out (2019), is a concentrated chronicle of survival at the margins of today's economy. These narrative poems are haunted by memories, some tragic, some funny, some stunningly beautiful. The title poem, and the longest in the book, is made up of couplets that build on themselves, poignantly registering a father's unwinding into depression and alcoholism. "He was like tissue paper / coming apart in water. / Like smoke in my hands." Two brothers are left sorting through the complexities of their father's life both tangible and ungraspable. In the briskly humorous "Account," a brief marriage ends with an offer of compensation: "she had covered / most of the wedding" and now "she wrote to say we could forget it / if I would let her claim me" as a tax deduction. These exacting poems pay homage to everyday workers, from a food taster in "Tester," to a human mannequin in "Model," Kunz captures the nickeled-and-dimed realities of trying to make ends meet. An unsparing yet buoyant collection.

The affecting and lyrical sophomore collection from Kunz (Tap Out) traces an arc from instability to renewal. Relying mostly on couplets as vehicles for his speaker's observations of contemporary American life, Kunz begins the book with poems about post-divorce emotional paralysis and the consuming drudgery of dead-end work: "If you think it's a scam/ why do you keep saying yes?" The poems foreground specifics, from "Spicy Three Bean Queso" dip to lawn mower upkeep, with their matter-of-fact presentation belying the speaker's irony. The solitary death of an estranged, alcoholic father is a major subject here, with the speaker and his brothers clearing out a cluttered apartment, where they "tried to be respectful// like in a museum." Kunz is less concerned with mourning or memorializing the dead than with the steps the living take to move on. In "Night Heron," a poem heralding the arrival of new love, a couple pretending to howl like wolves find it "impossible/ to stop waking up next morning/ hoarse and happy." 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: "We miss it,/ we say, hammering// garden boxes together." (Aug.)