Punch.
Poetry

Punch.

by: Ray McManus
Release date: Oct 1st, 2014

Ray McManus’s third book of poetry, Punch., is a call for the claw-hammer, a hymn to the steel toe, and a series of lonely missives from truck cabs and office cubicles. Read More

Softcover - $14.95
(ISBN: 978-1-938235-07-8)

Ray McManus’s third book of poetry, Punch., is a call for the claw-hammer, a hymn to the steel toe, and a series of lonely missives from truck cabs and office cubicles. Punch. is a book about work, about the will that rises and the dust that falls. It is about being “lost, hungry, and hopeless, creeping toward the pipelines in a '78 Buick Regal with Big Star on the radio.” Sometimes angry, sometimes darkly funny, these lean and muscular poems explore the world of punching in and punching out, the punch-drunk and the sucker-punched. Whether the poems are tightened by the rhythm of a hard hand, or the lines sprawl across the page with swagger, there is real music here. Brute voices, contemplative and haunting, speak to us with unwavering self-conflict and salty confidence. In these poems, life is a struggle and the end is already written, but there's something deeply moving about the resilience and resistance of these voices: “Lunch won't be here / for another hour,” one says, “so when the rain / comes, it is welcome.” 

More Praise for Punch.

"Former Poet Laureate, Philip Levine once said we write what we are given. Just as Levine was given industrial Detroit and James Wright was given rural Ohio, Ray McManus was given an American South where 'Every day is the bottom of a bucket. Every day is slide guitar,' where 'blistered hands, hearts, and tongues, give way to callus, the need to alter, to repair.' What Ray McManus has given us in return is Punch.: a tough, tenderhearted, phenomenal work about work. These are poems of lucid witness. Let us give thanks." —Terrance Hayes, National Book Award winner for Lighthead
"'Addition is easy,' McManus writes, and he means money in a day-worker's pocket, a lonesome man meeting his lover in an empty parking lot, the handful of bent nails a carpenter can't use, he means the grease and gears and rust and sweat and spit of a working-class life. This is a collection of poems written in the spirit of Levine's What Work Is, whose song is all hard knocks and hard-won knowledge. Its sections are named after blue-collar works shifts, which is fittingas Punch does the important work of honoring first shifts, swing shifts, graveyard shifts, and hours and days off between them." —Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

Cover Image: Rusty Hebert

Ray McManus
Author

Ray McManus

Ray McManus grew up on dirt roads in South Carolina where he worked various manual labor jobs until he attended the University of South Carolina where he earned his MFA in Poetry and Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition. His other titles include Red Dirt Jesus (Marick Press, 2011) and Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born (USC Press, 2007). His poetry has appeared in Crazyhorse, Nimrod, The Pinch, Hayden’s Ferry, Los Angeles Review and many other journals and anthologies. Ray is an Assistant Professor of English in the Division of Arts and Letters at University of South Carolina Sumter where he teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Southern literature. McManus is the winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize and Marick Press Prize in Poetry.

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