Reviews

Fixer by Edgar Kunz

barnstormingbooks's review

emotional medium-paced

5.0

 Fixer: Poems by Edgar Kunz 

Thank you to Netgalley and Harper Collins for the e-ARC

Usually CIS white male poetry doesn’t connect with me… however this somewhat gritty collection had me rapt, I read and reread this #BiteSizedBook over and over. Maybe it’s just the themes that hit home for me. I lost my brother to addiction and Kunz’s poems on the loss of his father and what it was like to enter the place his father passed away made me feel connected to the author. A shared experience that was visceral and sad without the melancholy or glorification of the dead that sometimes follows. 

This is a collection about loss, and personal mistakes, and reconciling one’s self, and watching someone fall into then be consumed by addiction. It is a subtle love letter to San Francisco and to starting over. This is not a collection about the beauty of language or the tricks and twists that English can produce. It is straightforward and brutally honest. Kunz plays with the function of meaning that comes from streams of well chosen words.

I do wish I had a hard copy so I could see the form of these poems, the digital is constrained in ways that limits that part of the delivery. However, the power of each poem was in itself enough to make me fall in love. This is a book I will add to my own collection when it is released on August 22, 2023. 

 

readingtomydogs's review

fast-paced

4.0

I was able to “get” these poems, they weren’t so wordy like others! Very well done.