Sitting on my back porch early one morning in September hand stealing a few precious moments of solitude before my children woke, I found myself moved to tears by a poem about Popeyes chicken.
I was as surprised as anyone by this development, but Bernardo Wade pulls no punches when evoking the food that fueled and fostered a way of belonging during a childhood undergirded by survival, want, and tough love. In his Popeyes musings, love is a kind of hunger, imagined as a mother’s tenderness: a protective shield “nestling them just inside/her hip’s curve as she wraps them perfectly/down her back.” And taste is a vehicle for memory, triggering a “yearning to crawl back inside/a simpler time.” These bittersweet reflections are delicately tangled in an extended metaphor about the cuisine of a Louisiana fast food empire (“in New Orleans, a city where someone/simmers the cayenne-soaked grease bucket like/God lit the fire because He felt a mother’s pressure”)—capturing the fragile emotional encounters, juxtaposed against swaggering irreverence, that characterize this stunning debut collection.
A Love Tap (Lookout Books 2025) emerges from Wade’s “deep need,” as figured by the poet Ross Gay in his forward. The New Orleans native son spends just shy of seventy pages grappling with his fragmented sense of identity born of both his intrinsically fraught and racialized upbringing and the evolving city around him. In his expansive and unflinching search for meaning, for a singular purpose, he grasps at the disparate parts of himself as they coalesce and contradict each other. He does not fail in this mission, exactly, insofar as he seems to settle on a deliberate action to punch through the mire of historical and personal trauma, of so many fraught loves and losses: “to live.”
"While the ghosts of friends, acquaintances, incarcerated fellows, and family haunt Wade’s collection, these figures, shadowy as they may be, are enveloped by the all-consuming energy of New Orleans itself. A character in its own right, the city serves not merely as a backdrop to Wade’s youth, but also as a constant companion that is not without its own ethos."
Meditating on substance abuse, navigating Black masculinity, falling into the churn of the prison industrial complex, and dwelling on the beauty and brutality of growing up under the oppressive thumb of a complicated, withholding father, Wade’s poems straddle an italicized line of vulnerability and bravado. His unbothered, hubristic mask donned to keep the harsh world at bay dissolves in moments of raw, bone-deep brokenness—on a fetid jailhouse floor, when a counselor rests a hand on his shoulder during an admitted moment of suicidal ideation, within an apology whispered in vain to a partner falling out of love. Amid efforts to both reinscribe and take ownership of his hard-won pride, 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.
Interspersed copiously throughout these heavier thematic explorations are the persistent South Louisiana signifiers that transform the collection into something deliciously tangible, from music, architecture, and language to, perhaps most striking—food. Indeed, food is ubiquitous within Wade’s collection. In a poem about his drug arrest, he references his “mother’s gumbo on Christmas day.” After witnessing a stabbing, he picks up Popeyes for his father. He writes of a paramour unwilling to commit, a Parisian affair adorned in pâté and “cheap burgundy.” Taste serves to remind readers that Wade’s is a richly embodied world, even when the challenges of unknowable identity remain abstract, amorphous.
While the ghosts of friends, acquaintances, incarcerated fellows, and family haunt Wade’s collection, these figures, shadowy as they may be, are enveloped by the all-consuming energy of New Orleans itself. A character in its own right, the city serves not merely as a backdrop to Wade’s youth, but also as a constant companion that is not without its own ethos. Wade’s is a distinctly post-Katrina city, one that continues to recover not merely from that disaster, but all the ones that came after—even from the ravages of tourists flocking to the Super Bowl. The landmarks (the French Quarter, Lafayette Square), streets (Canal, Royal, Bienville), iconic establishments (Jesuit, the Hotel Monteleone), shotgun houses, and palatial mansions of New Orleans are so much a part of Wade he couldn’t disentangle them if he tried—and don’t even think about calling any of it “resilient.”
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Yet within the setting and characterization of the city he loves, Wade also takes pains to invoke the omnipresence of the carceral state, painting a landscape of constant dread that reveals how Blackness (his own, and others’) is spatialized, limited, and entrapped in ordinary and everyday ways. The New Orleans Police Department and the blue lights of squad cars pervade this collection, sirens and tire squeals inciting fear from the quiet gloom of a city street. Even driving on a dark road far from Louisiana, Wade continues to look over his shoulder, the death of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta fresh on his mind as he imagines a reality in which the man who has become a grim police violence statistic is alive and free.
Among these meticulously deconstructed facets of the city, Orleans Parish Prison—infamous for allegations of corruption and abuse—draws the most scrutiny. Within the walls of the crumbling detention center, forgotten men ache for a little mercy, the warm arms of a mother, and the chance to return to an immaculate (often imagined) childhood. Though they are little more than specters in Wade’s hazy recollection, their emotional resonance feels urgent, all too real; Wade cannot help but redirect his readers to the humanity of those sharing his experience of incarceration, the men desperate to be defined by something other than their confinement in this liminal, hellish space.
Some of Wade’s poems wander to other states, other countries: to New York, Indiana, Georgia, France. But his poems about New Orleans feel truest, containing within them an ineffable spirit that cannot be mimicked by the uninitiated, the unbaptized. And it is in this city where his addictions, his failures, his unrealized dreams are unapologetically laid bare. Toward the end of the third movement in Wade’s collection, he ponders: “Why aren’t my loves unchained?” This question does not demand an answer, necessarily; and yet, you get the feeling while paging through the remaining poems that he is slowly, ever so slowly, loosening the shackles himself. bernardowade.com.
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