Ray McManus | Poet

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

"'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 fitting--as Punch does the important work of honoring first shifts, swing shifts, graveyard shifts, and hours and days off between them."     —Dorianne Laux

I love a Southern book, and Punch. ​is masterfully Southern.   —Jillian Weise