Punch.
Ray
McManus
“What Ray McManus has given us is Punch.: a
tough, tenderhearted, phenomenal work about
work. These are poems of lucid witness.
Let us give thanks.”
—Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead
“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
“I love a Southern book and Punch. is masterfully Southern.”
—Jillian Weise, author of The Book of Goodbyes
ZZZ
ray mcmanus’s third book of poetry, punch., is a call for the
$14.95 Softcover
October 1, 2014
978-1-938235-07-8
5.5 x 9, 62 pages
Poetry/Literary
Distributed to the trade by John F. Blair,
1-800-222-9796, www.blairpub.com
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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.”
Author tour of cities and book festivals in the Northeast and Southeast
Lit journal ads | Blog tour | ARC distribution to reviewers and booksellers
Social media outreach | Author’s website www.raymcmanus.com
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 and
Driving through the country before you are born. 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.