Kirjahaku

Randall Mann's "Breakfast with Thom Gunn" is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is 'pitiless', the trees 'thin and bloodless', the words 'like the icy water' of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the 'graceful erosion' of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in - and aroused by - a glittering, unforgiving subculture. "Breakfast with Thom Gunn" is at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal.

Randall Mann's "Breakfast with Thom Gunn" is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is 'pitiless', the trees 'thin and bloodless', the words 'like the icy water' of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the 'graceful erosion' of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in - and aroused by - a glittering, unforgiving subculture. "Breakfast with Thom Gunn" is at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal.

Randall Mann combines the regal and ribald, his ear for poetic form matched by his unrelenting eye for lasciviousness, in this fetching chronicle of oversexed youth. "Craft and bravura mix well...Mann shows himself Thom Gunn's] apt pupil...The clarity startles." -Richard Raynor, Los Angeles Times

For years, Randall Mann has been hailed as one of contemporary American poetry s most daring formalists, expertly using craft as a way of exploring racy subjects with trenchant wit and aplomb. His new collection, Proprietary, depicts with the insights of a longtime insider the culture of corporate America, in which he s worked for years, intertwined with some of his tried-and-true subjects, including gay life in the wildly disparate worlds of San Francisco and northern Florida."

Political and sequined, Deal: New and Selected Poems contains the most memorable of Mann's previous five collections and presents new poems of disco, lament, and formal invention.One of our leading American practitioners of poetic form and liberating constraint, Randall Mann has for the past thirty years confronted what it means to identify as multiracial and queer in urban America. Deal: New and Selected Poems harnesses five previous volumes and includes economical yet expansive new works rooted in an age of Wi-Fi, apps, and chat notifications. His newest poems, written in concise, contemporary lines, move us word by word, until we arrive at a stark reality.Unafraid of the nexus between politics, syntax, and the contradictions of the colloquial, Mann's poetry refuses "token liberation" and reminds us that "life's a cold exercise in looking back"--back to disco and fetish, to a shared gay history, to his childhood Florida or his beloved San Francisco. Whether writing a sestina in the voice of the mortician of Harvey Milk's murderer, or a deeply moving pantoum elegizing bullied gay adolescents who committed suicide, formal invention for Mann remains intensely personal. This collection--erotic, mournful, and often satirical--characteristically subverts, even as it enlarges, a language that continues to fail us.Timestamped by surprise and exhaustion, and filled with the everyday indignities of being alive, Deal: New and Selected Poems affirms Randall Mann, in the words of Garth Greenwell, as "among our finest, most skillful poets of love and ruin."