Bernardo Wades A Love Tapintroduced by award-winning poet and essayist Ross Gayreckons 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.
Wades 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 merciesa 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 lifes most formative moments, he cant 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 tapthe softest way to knuckle anothers cheek.
