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.

Other poems by Randall Mann in Verse Daily:
April 5, 2009:   "Monday" "While you wait for the J train, for work, think..."
June 27, 2007:   "The Sunset" " Fog, like reason, settles on the peeling district...."

Books by Randall Mann:

Other poems on the web by Randall Mann:
"Fiduciary"
"Bernal Hill"
"N"
"Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery"
Three poems

Randall Mann according to Wikipedia.

About Breakfast with Thom Gunn:

"With audacious wit and formal prowess equal to the master to whom he pays homage, Randall Mann has written a book both poignant and humorous, where one minute `we stand above it all' and the next minute we are reading `the notes of the drowned.' Mann invites us into a ghastly metropolis, its emptiness and ruin nonetheless populated with remarkable sites of grace. If this were only the evacuated city, `the nothingness behind us / the nothingness ahead,' the permanent red of Ilium scattered with fallen bodies, the feral world of nonchalant disease, rent boys, and assassins, it would simply be another note of irretrievable loss in the parade of human history. But with purling fountains and lush gardens, Mann reveals the transitory yet beguiling beauty that holds despair in abeyance, that reminds us of why desire propels us forward. `Soon we will be underground,' he says, but for now we enjoy the cherries that dangle tantalizingly before us."
—D. A. Powell

"Eloquence and anxiety lie side by side in Randall Mann's poems; careful craft and bravado also do. The verse brims with honesty. The voice scintillates. Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a necessary book, reminding us again and again of poetry as it's meant to beambivalence expressed clearly."
—Carol Frost