Breakfast with Thom Gunn
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

Acknowledgments
I
Early Morning on Market Street
Election Day
But
Politics
Fetish
Song
Queen Christina
The Mortician in San Francisco
Aubade
Bernal Hill
The Sunset
Abandoned Landscapes
Short Short
Charity
Ruin
Pure
Last Call
II
Pastoral
Syntax
Little Colonial Song
The Lake of Nostalgia
The End of Landscape
Ode
Night: A Fragment
Breakfast with Thom Gunn
Ovid in San Francisco
Ganymede on Polk Street
Orpheus at Café Flore
Stranded
Modern Art
To Francis Bacon
Reception
Career
Postcard from California
The Long View
N
III
Ocean Beach
Translation
Lexington
Design
The Rape of Ganymede
Colloquy between A and B
Intimacy
Monday
Seeking
Well, Here We Are
A View
South City
Poetry
Fiction
Notes“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 a 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 but 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.”
“Randall Mann’s second collection of poetry, Breakfast with Thom Gunn—aptly titled for its poetic inheritance of metrical clarity and its address of gay subculture—also uses moments of real social incident, transforming private history into odes to the afflicted. In this work, the many contradictions of desire touch the reader: politics, beauty, God, disease, love, art—all the world’s addictions—and it achieves an entertainment that is satisfying when harsh.”
Commonwealth Club of California: California Book Awards
Finalist
Lambda Literary Foundation: Lambda Literary Awards
Finalist
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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