Complaint in the Garden (Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry Series)
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.From "Song"In the grainy yellow artless light a warmth is in the air. and our fair hero—shirtless, thin— flips his feathered hairAnd gives someone the eye. What’s next is obvious enough, suitably raw but loving, almost, and almost never rough.