Coming soon from Diode Editions, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry by Randall Mann.
The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry brings Randall Mann’s characteristic wit, fearlessness, and attention to language, to twenty years of critical works, including reviews of early books by Laura Kasischke and Vijay Seshadri; essays on Shame, Money, and Forgetting; appreciations of Thom Gunn and John Ashbery; and two interviews. This incisive collection—a combination of criticism, close reading, autobiography, exuberance, and occasional irritation—offers a look into the mind of one of America’s finest formalists, revealing how the compression and vulnerability of the lyric draws us closer to, while asking us to resist, the limitations, freedoms, and intimacies of poetry.
RANDALL MANN is the author of four collections of poetry: Complaint in the Garden, which received the Kenyon Review Prize; Breakfast with Thom Gunn; Straight Razor; and Proprietary; three of these collections were named finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle; Washington Post; Literary Hub; Kenyon Review; and Poetry, which awarded him the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize. A longtime member of the National Book Critics Circle, he lives in San Francisco.
The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry is forthcoming in March 2019. Until then, get yourself a copy of his latest poetry collection, Proprietary (Persea, 2017), and read his conversation with Eric Smith on LitHub, "Taking Down Corporate Culture With Poetry."
