Bones Washed with Wine
Jeff Mann
"...to call these poems love poems would be to let their gathering narrative—powerful, painful, gorgeous as it is—eclipse their craft, their image by bright image, their fine ear, as they accumulate into the kind of love poems that transcend the lover and gather up every richness: good food, words, kisses, in short, life." —Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
"There is profound sensuality in these verses, with language that allows readers to delve below surface descriptions and encounter the soldiers' [re New Market Battlefield poem in the collection] passion on a visceral level. Instead of cataloguing banal details, these verses revel in riotous excess, a sumptuous carpe diem festival tempered, if only for a moment, by Mann's sobering recognition that death lurks nearby, silent, unseen, but always present." —Nathan G. Tipton, The Lambda Book Report, June/July 2004
"Jeff Mann is a poet who is deep but whimsical and who can surprise and entrance the reader with word choice while remaining totally intelligible." —George Brosi, New Appalachian Books: Write-Ups
"Jeff Mann is a poet to treasure both for the wealth of his language and the generosity of his spirit." —Edward Falco, author of Acid
Jeff Mann
Jeff Mann was born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and spent his first ten years in Covington, Virginia, before moving with his family to Hinton, West Virginia, where he attended high school. Graduating from West Virginia University in 1981, he received from the College of Arts and Sciences a B.A. in English and from the School of Agriculture and orestry a B.S. in Recreation with a Nature Interpretation emphasis. He later returned to West Virginia University to complete an M.A. in English. Mann presently divides his time between Hinton, West Virginia; Charleston, West Virginia; and Blacksburg, Virginia, where he has taught in the English Department since 1989. He teaches an assortment of classes, among them Appalachian literature, Gay and Lesbian literature, Creative Writing, freshman composition (focusing on the vampire in literature and film), Southern literature, and satire.
