A Love Tap - by Bernardo Wade (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Bernardo Wade's A Love Tap--introduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gay--reckons with complexities of racial identity, masculinity, recovery, and spirituality, revealing the narrative and psychic evolution of a poet who has found himself in the language.

Wade's evocative debut swaggers through time, through family, through love, through the perseverance of growing up in the deep South as a Black son with a white mom. Illustrating the strangeness and cacophony of his native New Orleans, he divines sweet relief in small mercies--a rosary strung with Mardi Gras beads, a Sunday football game, Nigel Hall covering Frankie Beverly in Lafayette Square, bare feet in a stream, a mother kneading dough. In intimate, nuanced portraits of loved ones, in requiems and broken sestinas, he pushes past his trauma, troubling the years he spent in addiction or resenting his father.

As he maps out the parts he played in his life's most formative moments, he can't help but "retune the heart / strings of hard men," teaching us how to become more human, often in the face of inhumanity. Here, he manages to land, not a crushing blow, but a love tap--the softest way to knuckle another's cheek.

Review Quotes

"Wade offers us mercy in the form of poems that maintain a distinct Southern swagger while moving away from bravado and toward forgiveness." --India Lena Gonzalez, Poets & Writers

"A deliberate action to punch through the mire of historical and personal trauma, of so many fraught loves and losses: 'to live.' . . . Wade's weary search for identity, sobriety, and intimacy carries the unmistakable echo of shame, of submission to the not-knowing that burnishes each vignette with a kind of grace." --Jacqueline DeRobertis-Braun, Country Roads magazine

"Thing about a love tap is that it hurts. But it's also a kind of gentleness. Pain inflicted, but also pain withheld. A pulled punch. A mercy. It shows us how and where we are soft, vulnerable--even mortal. Such is the case with Bernardo Wade's bruising debut. A Love Tap is the book I didn't know I was waiting for. And Wade is the poet I didn't know I needed." --John Murillo, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

"One of the pleasures of Wade's poems is that they shirk neither humor nor swagger nor play nor a little not-quite-subtle shit talk. These poems, even when they're hurting, enjoy themselves. They flash a smile at you time to time. They're stylish. They're interested in the tilt of their cap, the cuff of their jeans; not only what the words mean, but how they lean, how they sound. They want to be pretty on their way to being beautiful. On their way to being true. Even as they confront and reconcile with a former self, or come to terms with, or understand, or forgive even, and mourn." --Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights, from the Foreword

"In this emotionally capacious work--quiet, measured, possessed by its ruins--Bernardo Wade reminds me that language in need of mercies can indeed become a mercy. Beautiful with astonishments, curiosity, and honesty, A Love Tap is a procession of Wade's selves and his beloveds through the atmosphere of his personal music." --Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria

"Bernardo Wade's A Love Tap circulates within one's pores not as stentorian glare, but as charismatic susurration, attuning the ear to his perpetual lingual brilliance."  --Will Alexander, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten