Proprietary: Poems

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Product Details
Price
$15.95  $14.83
Publisher
Persea Books
Publish Date
Pages
80
Dimensions
5.4 X 0.3 X 7.9 inches | 0.26 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780892554812
BISAC Categories:

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About the Author

Randall Mann is a writer and editor who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Complaint in the Garden, winner of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry.

Reviews
The poems in this collection... straddle the distance between a San Francisco of hedonistic pleasures and a San Francisco of corporate doublespeak. In echoing that earlier city, Mann evokes Thom Gunn, a noted San Francisco poet or even Baudelaire, a poet of raw urban desire. But in threading these poems about lust, longing and alienation through a brave new world of org charts and web portals, Mann imagines anew what it means to connect or to feel at a loss in the age of the Internet.--Tess Taylor "Randall Mann's 'Proprietary' Reinvents Classic San Francisco Poetry "
Sonically, Mann is a master of formalist design with a witty sense for line-breaks. He is not one for an elliptical poetic. He represents perhaps the best in gay male poetry today, with a message of protest against corporate American life that is as relevant as it is timely. Mann's work should be admired for its ferocity, its craft, and its unabashedly gay point of view.
Mann weaves personal lyric with corporate jargon, brand names, and unflinching sexuality in his slippery fourth collection... Late-20th-century nostalgia and office park lingo are sung as nursery rhymes, creating a poetics that modulates between stark and whimsical, syrupy and wry. The dreams of the past and realities of the present define the tension between these registers as a tech-obsessed San Francisco collides with the grotto of what was once a gay promised land.
Mann has crafted a collection that is brutal and funny, poignant and honest in equal measure.
These are poems of the modern city, everyday poems and products of their environment, and the poet knows it. Anyone who's lived in large cities knows they can be unforgiving places; there's the occasional reprieve but, even (perhaps especially) when it promises a lot, Mann is typically conflicted.
Mann thrives on the demands of constraint, the challenge of needing to go deep into a subject to find the rhyme, to maintain the integrity of the line, to render an experience with clarity, control, and concision. His work demonstrates a formal rigour not often seen in contemporary poetry, even in his free verse which, as Mann reminds us, is a formal choice.
From the board room to the back room, Mann dissects how we use language and negotiate our desire against the backdrop of the United States' corporate and material culture, while simultaneously reminding us not to lose sight of how that culture, or subsets of that culture, have shaped our understanding of ourselves.
[I]n these poems, [Mann] is... a reluctant (if unrepentant) bricoleur--pilfering from Slack chats and Powerpoint slides, from vested options and IPOs, the enervating rhetoric of start-up culture, and fashioning from it a radical public art.--Eric Smith
Mann is as fearless a poet as I've ever seen.