“Thing about a love tap is that it hurts. But it’s also a kind of gentleness. Pain inflicted, but also pain withheld. A pulled punch. A mercy. It shows us how and where we are soft, vulnerable—even mortal. Such is the case with Bernardo Wade’s bruising debut. A Love Tap is the book I didn’t know I was waiting for. And Wade is the poet I didn’t know I needed.”

“One of the pleasures of Wade’s poems is that they shirk neither humor nor swagger nor play nor a little not-quite-subtle shit talk. These poems, even when they’re hurting, enjoy themselves. They flash a smile at you time to time. They’re stylish. They’re interested in the tilt of their cap, the cuff of their jeans; not only what the words mean, but how they lean, how they sound. They want to be pretty on their way to being beautiful. On their way to being true. Even as they confront and reconcile with a former self, or come to terms with, or understand, or forgive even, and mourn.”

“In this emotionally capacious work—quiet, measured, possessed by its ruins—Bernardo Wade reminds me that language in need of mercies can indeed become a mercy. Beautiful with astonishments, curiosity, and honesty, A Love Tap is a procession of Wade’s selves and his beloveds through the atmosphere of his personal music.”

“In his expansive and unflinching search for meaning, for a singular purpose, [Wade] grasps at the disparate parts of himself as they coalesce and contradict each other . . . [settling] on a deliberate action to punch through the mire of historical and personal trauma, of so many fraught loves and losses: ‘to live.’ . . . Wade’s weary search for identity, sobriety, and intimacy carries the unmistakable echo of shame, of submission to the not-knowing that burnishes each vignette with a kind of grace.”