Proprietary
Randall Mann

Through his poems, Randall Mann has always insisted on authenticity when encountering shallowness and euphemism. Now, he eyes and slyly rebukes the American corporate culture and materialism that has metastasized since the 1980s and sanitized his formerly lurid stomping grounds of northern Florida and San Francisco, as well as the country at large. Delightfully barbed and decidedly timely, Proprietary is an important new book by “a writer of breathtaking honesty” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). 

“The poems in this collection... straddle the distance between a San Francisco of hedonistic pleasures and a San Francisco of corporate doublespeak.... [I]n 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, NPR’s All Things Considered

“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.”
—London Magazine

“Mann’s work should be admired for its ferocity, its craft, and its unabashedly gay point of view.”
—Lambda Literary

Randall Mann is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Straight Razor, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, and Complaint in the Garden. He lives in San Francisco. 

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) /  ISBN 978-0-89255-481-2 / 78 pages / Poetry

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