Is this a storyor a problem,a colleague said.I’m dead!Which is to say,livingfor her shade.I switch offmy face,and chatSorry.Havingissues.Anythingbut that…I’m lookingto stream.I settle onI Killed My Mother.Rotten Tomatoes’pithydescription?“A young homosexualhas problemswith his mother,”which is alsoevery film everwhen I watch.The first filmI ever sawwas Citizen Kane,nice start but alsoare you kidding,a lessonin all-downhill-from-here—it was at theKentuckyTheatre,a palacewith deliciousOrange Whip.I was six.The firstgay thingI rememberother thanthe longingwas seeingRock Hudsonon a stretcheron the newsI didn’t knowI knew…Have a greatweekend,we endour e-mails,late in the day.Great.Like theweekend,modifiershave a wayof taking usfartheraway:the longwalk;the afternoonread.Regret.Maroonedon my shelves,like PaulMonette.Allmy ambitiousfriends wantto talk aboutis joy.Oh boy:The End.Maybe that’sfire,maybe satire—so much rollsoff the tongue.There is alwaysthe distanceto revise.Look howI’m undoingmy own ruinnow.
Friday
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- July 6, 2024
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“Friday” from DEAL: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Randall Mann.
Published by Copper Canyon Press on May 9, 2023.
Copyright © 20243 by Randall Mann.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Randall Mann is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Deal: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Recent work appears in the anthology Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, as well as in the Adroit Journal, Poem-A-Day, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. He works as a medical writer in biotech, is on the faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in San Francisco.
Port Townsend, Washington
“Mann’s poetic output for the past two decades has proven consistently provocative and rewarding, and this collection provides an excellent overview of the work of an exceedingly fine poet.”
—Diego Báez, Booklist, starred review
“Few American poets have written so faultlessly in pantoums, villanelles, sestinas, or page-spanning palindromes; even fewer were thirtysomethings debuting in the early 2000s. Emboldened by his guiding influence, Thom Gunn, the young Mann applied traditional forms to novel (but fittingly formalized) subjects: the patterns and poses of gay sociality, ‘hanky code’ and hookup culture, haute couture and exquisite smut. Deal: New and Selected Poems chronicles how Mann progressed from this early work to his most distinctive poems—a paradoxical process, equal parts unbuttoning and self-restraint. Book by book, Mann loosens up, fostering a comfortable distance through persona and caricature, exchanging the autobiography of Randall Mann for ironic portraiture of one randy man.”
—Christopher Spaide, Harriet Books at the Poetry Foundation
“It’s an event: Randall Mann’s work is now gathered in Deal: New and Selected, a volume of poems as rich as they are chiseled. . . . His poems have a pulsing beauty, sometimes driving, sometimes graceful with the poised supple rigidity of a ballet dancer.”—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney’s
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