Edgar creates such a vivid and heartwretching narrative through poems of his relationship or lack of with his father and his fathers death. While shedding light on his present love for his partner. Its beautiful, sad, and well written.

“fixer” is a neat little collection of poems mainly about the mundanity of the midwest. born and raised in the midwest, i found a lot in these poems that i could relate to, a lot that i’ve personally seen. if there’s one thing edgar kunz can do, it’s create a sense of place and location firmly rooted through imagery.

the poems are all fairly uniform, but some do experiment a bit with length. i was really hoping that there would be more poems that pushed the boundary of form, but i also understand the restraints of an ebook. i feel that there was just something missing, whether it be in line, enjambment, form, or something else. maybe a single caesura would have done it for me, who knows. the tone and meter are essentially the same in each poem, save for a few. i was just left wanting more.

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review!

Edward Kunz is a poet of the everyday world. The poems in Fixer are filled with close, rigorously unsentimental observations; many poems are about the challenges of daily life and steady work. He writes about job hunting and work shifts and negotiating rent with landlords. In his poems, he is up ladders or stacking gas station shelves with sun chips and snickers, or working on an island replacing broken cottage windowpanes. The world around him is rarely beautiful, but the poet brings observation without judgement.

A number of poems are about his father. In an early poem, he reports listening to a drunken voice message from his father; later he and his brother clean out his father’s desolate apartment after his death, and we learn that he has not seen his father in ten years. Other poems trace conversations with his brothers and his mother about his father.

He was like tissue paper
coming apart in water.

But he is clear-eyed about small wins—a landlord lets him move to a better apartment for a reduced rent, he and his girlfriend find another apartment with a tiny dishwasher and feel fortunate, or the conversation in which his ex-wife agrees that if she can claim him on her taxes, he won’t owe her anything else. These moments begin to gather momentum. I was reminded of what Pablo Neruda about Walt Whitman, that “he held himself to be the debtor of happiness and sorrow alike.” And that in “Walt Whitman’s work one never finds the ignorant being humbled, nor is the human condition ever found offended.” (NYT April 14, 1972). This is true of Kunz as well.

In “Night Heron,” the poet reports on juxtapositions such as seeing a heron perched on a theatre awning on which is written: “We Live in a Fake Democracy,” and later having a tender moment with a girlfriend in the dank basement of his mother’s house.

I’m letting
myself feel how astonishing how
astonishing what our love can make
of a place like that

These moments of connection—with others, with the natural world, with plain dumb luck--light up the otherwise bleak landscape and create the deepest resonances of the collection.

Thanks to the publisher, Ecco Press, and to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC of this book..