You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Aubade Those who lack a talent for love have come to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls like lies on the surface; the slow red of a pilot’s boat; the groan of a fisherman hacking a small shark— and our speech like the icy water, a poor translation that will not carry us across. What brought us west, anyway? A hunger. But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed only on scenery, the safest form of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray deepening into gray, the color of heartbreak. 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 li...
From “a writer of breathtaking honesty” (David Ulin, LA Times), gorgeous new poems that are satirical, open-hearted, and unrepentantly queer. In his poetry, “at once boisterous and lubed, anxious and ambivalent” (Kenyon Review), Randall Mann has always had his finger on the pulse of modern life. In his liminal new book of poetry, a gay, multiracial (“they called me yellow in Lexington”) speaker exists in the rift between the “fluorescent rot” of childhood and the “action; / transaction” of a sex-app midlife. The author of Straight Razor and Proprietary, Mann has long been admired for merging raw subject matter with formal ease. A Better Life shows him at the height of his gifts, in the clipped, haunting truth of its rhymes and rhythms.
From poolside to seaside, barroom to classroom, sex club to colonial Florida, Randall Mann's curiosity endeavors to discover, often ironically, the beauty of things in the world around him. These meditations-harsh, honest, explicit (though never vulgar), dark, and astute-reflect a sentiment for the urbane and the primitive in nature, history, love, and humankind. Mann invites readers into lush landscapes, sundry histories, and a contemporary gay San Francisco populated by those things and people loved and lost. Randall Mann was born in Provo, Utah, and now lives in San Francisco, California. His poetry and book reviews have appeared in the New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, Salmagundi, and Verse. He works as an administrative analyst at the University of California, San Francisco.
Bawdy yet elegant poems depicting the debaucheries and traumas of growing up amid San Francisco's gay scene. 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 Rayner, Los Angeles Times
In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, the prominent theorist Georgi Derleugian has gathered together a quintet of eminent macrosociologists to assess whether the capitalist system can survive.
Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling...
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...
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "Wray's poems are wry luxury items of intelligence, sheathed in the latent double of speech, where a word like family might mean, in the queer parlance, refuge, but also, refutation. This is an interrogative, primal, mythic collection, a poetry of privacy and disclosure, of contradiction, a disabused landscape under 'razor-wire stars.'"--Randall Mann "NO DOUBT I WILL RETURN A DIFFERENT MAN explores how complicated relationships between fathers and sons cast long shadows over the future self. In Wray's poems, eros shades at times uncomfortably into social violence and self-abnegation, making this book both love song and elegy to masculinity and its performances, to qu...
"Part review, part testament to extraordinary dedication, and part call to get involved, Cetacean Societies highlights the achievements of behavioral ecologists inspired by the challenges of cetaceans and committed to the exploration of a new world."—from the preface by Richard Wrangham Long-lived, slow to reproduce, and often hidden beneath the water's surface, whales and dolphins (cetaceans) have remained elusive subjects for scientific study even though they have fascinated humans for centuries. Until recently, much of what we knew about cetaceans came from commercial sources such as whalers and trainers for dolphin acts. Innovative research methods and persistent efforts, however, have...
None