Work samples
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"Night Heron" recording for Brooklyn Poets
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The Slowdown w/ U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith: Episode 23Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith introducing and reading my poem "My Father at 49, Working the Night Shift at B&R Diesel" for her podcast The Slowdown.
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Edgar Kunz reads "Salvage"Me reading my poem "Salvage" for a project called Ours Poetica, a collaboration between John Green (author of The Fault in our Stars, etc.) and The Poetry Foundation.
Fixer
I have a new poetry collection called Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023), a shape-shifty book that starts as an examination of work and labor in late-capitalist America: the gig economy, squatters, conspiracy theories, the impending robot rebellion. Then it turns to the eponymous long poem, a series of "long sonnets" that deal with the aftermath of the father’s death in poems that are both devastating and darkly funny, and center on the relationship between three brothers. Then the book resolves into a series of complex love poems that point to possible hopeful futures. Poems from the book appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Yale Review.
It got a full-page review in the New York Times-- they call the book "Haunting" and say "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." It was also positively reviewed in the Washington Post ("An arresting vision buoyed by Kunz's wry wit"), Booklist ("Stunningly beautiful...Unsparing yet buoyant"), and Publishers Weekly ("Stunning and lyrical...Kunz has written a beautiful book").
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Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023)
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"Piano" in The New Yorker
"Piano" in the New Yorker
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"from 'Fixer'" in Poetry Magazine"from 'Fixer'" in Poetry Magazine
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Therapy (1 of 2), first published in The New Yorker
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Therapy (2 of 2), first published in The New Yorker
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Night Heron (1 of 4), first published in American Poetry Review
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Night Heron (2 of 4), first published in American Poetry Review
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Night Heron (3 of 4), first published in American Poetry Review
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Night Heron (4 of 4), first published in American Poetry Review
Tap Out
Here's my first book, Tap Out, published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2019. The New York Times named it a "New & Noteworthy" book and The Washington Post said it was "a gritty and insightful debut." It's a collection of poems about growing up in working poor New England. It's also about escape, inheritance, California, bitcoin, various dumb jobs, and the anxieties of class mobility. The writing of the book was supported by fellowships from Stanford University and the NEA, and it won a few awards including the Julia Ward Howe Prize.
Individual poems were published in places like Ploughshares, New England Review, Sewanee Review, AGNI, and Gulf Coast, and reprinted in places like Best New Poets 2015 (ed. U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith), Best New Poets 2017 (ed. Natalie Diaz), NEA Writers' Corner, Poetry Daily, and The Millions.
The book has also been translated into Italian and published by Fuorolinea (Rome, IT). And they translated an essay I wrote for LitHub and published it as an afterword. Che bello!
Uncollected Essays
I've started to write essays loosely about the craft of writing poems. I'm averaging one essay per book of poetry I write, so I'm not exactly setting any records! I am proud of them though-- they're a stretch for me artistically and they're a good representation of my thinking. The first, called "Hand Over Hand", is about poetry's relationship to lying. The second, called "Unspendable Currency", is about how late-capitalist hustle culture intersects with making poems, and how the internalized tenets of industrial capitalism are a danger to the art.
Reviews + Press
Here's a selection of reviews and press Fixer and Tap Out have received from publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and others.
Interviews
Here's a selection of interviews I've given for print and online publications like Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and for podcasts with Literary Hub and The Library of Congress.
Tour Posters
I've given over a hundred readings/talks/book signings in the U.S. and Europe, from Baltimore to San Francisco to Reykjavik to Paris. Here are posters -- most made by me, a few made by the press -- to get the word out about some of these events.