Proprietary: Poems

Mann (Straight Razor) weaves personal lyric with corporate jargon, brand names, and unflinching sexuality in his slippery fourth collection: “And at our age!/ Soy candles/ and man-handles;/ Pottery-Barn// party-bottoms./ The old thinking:/ the sky, the color/ of a wine cooler,// everyone says is blue.” Late-20th-century nostalgia and office park lingo are sung as nursery rhymes, creating a poetics that modulates between stark and whimsical, syrupy and wry. The dreams of the past and realities of the present define the tension between these registers as a tech-obsessed San Francisco collides with the grotto of what was once a gay promised land. In “Leo & Lance,” Mann first recounts the tender pre-internet days of buying porn on VHS, then looks up the two eponymous actors on IMDB—“(Where have all// the hustlers gone,/ anyway?)/ They died// weeks apart,/ in 1991./ Lance first,// in May,/ in San Jose,/ of AIDS complications.” This analog lust and the desires of the smartphone app era found in sites “with names like Adam4Adam and Manhunt” also reveal a queer lineage marked by its own complicated, subterranean histories of love and loss. If the collection’s title nods toward anything, it’s Mann’s quest to claim his own lived and inherited histories, and he does so with an unsparing wit above all else. (June)