John Mann is an archivist of the human heart and an accountant both
of the natural world and popular culture. His precisely observed
juxtapositioning of these in Able, Baker, Charlie never fails to
surprise, never fails to move us. As Rilke advised readers to
change our lives, so does Mann often build toward the insistent, as
in "Hand over your dearest songs"-advice which the poet himself has
surely heeded in this marvelous collection. -David Stevenson John
Mann's poems approach you not like the lantern that you plod
towards through darkness, but like fireflies appearing at different
points within the range of your vision that engage your every
sense, enough for you to make sense of the journey you take through
his unsettling, elliptical world. They seem to be written in
outlying areas where the usual compasses and watches will not
serve, but they will so thoroughly claim you that you may find that
you have suspended your breathing. George Ellenbogen We have fooled
ourselves into thinking that pain is simple-it is emptiness, a
chasm. But John Mann's poetry shows loss with all of its lurid
filigree, its barbed-wire curlicues. Mann probes this "atmosphere
of void covered with frost" throughout Able, Baker, Charlie, and he
manages to capture how we leave this void changed. There is no
mitigating agent. Even love is defined as "the heart outside the
body." Beauty is something that leaks from the eyes, and the sky
"vomits its stars." Able, Baker, Charlie is a beautiful, painful
read-more acute because of its dead-eye accuracy. -Karen Craigo,
Mid-American Review John Mann is the author of Wyoming, a chapbook
of poems (Finishing Line Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in
Alaska Quarterly Review, Fence, Conduit, Massachusetts Review,
Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Vallum,
Crazyhorse, and The Gettysburg Review. He won a Poetry Fellowship
from the Illinois Arts Council and a resident fellowship from the
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He taught creative writing
at Western Illinois University and edited The Mississippi Valley
Review.
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