A Love Tap

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.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Bernardo Wade received the Academy of American Poets Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize, the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize, and the Third Coast Poetry Prize. A Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has published in The Nation, Ecotone, Guernica, and The Southern Review, among other places. He is the poetry editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. A Love Tap is his debut collection.

• Publisher: Lookout Books
  
• Publish Date: October 21, 2025
  
• Pages: 80
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Paperback
• EAN: 9781940596587
  
• Dimensions: 8.8 X 5.8 X 0.6 inches