Synopsis
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
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About the Author
Randall Mann is the author of Complaint in the Garden (2004), which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the California Book Award; Straight Razor (2013), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and Proprietary (2017) a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of a book of criticism, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry (2019), as well as co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (2007). He lives in San Francisco.
Reviews
In his third book, Mann (Breakfast with Thom Gunn, 2009) continues to probe the quotidian concerns and manifold frustrations of gay identity, focusing on life in San Francisco and Florida (that empire of moss). Mann employs an array of forms with overwhelming proficiency, from the churning repetition woven into September Elegies, a pantoum in memory of gay youth who committed suicide, to an arresting sestina in which the speaker breaks through the fourth wall (Tonight I reserve my contempt / for you, audience). But the book is not without its humor: Mann fills a poem called Small Talk with words like fubsy, edentate, and nictitating. He draws awareness to the artifice of his work (My formalism blinds / the critics. Like a star) and tosses off references to the Satyricon and Cinnabon in the same stanza. And while some may find themselves unnerved by the frank physicality and harsh realities he depicts, readers would do well to recognize Mann’s place alongside poets like D. A. Powell, Marilyn Hacker, and Anne Sexton. --Diego Báez
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Straight Razor: Poems
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Straight Razor: Poems
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Straight Razor: Poems
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Persea Books, 2013
ISBN 10: 0892554304
ISBN 13: 9780892554300
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Straight Razor: Poems
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