Mammal

Author: Richard Loranger

Publisher: Roof Books (2023)

Mammal is the latest collection of poetry and flash prose from legendary Bay Area rebel Richard Loranger. The book is grounded in a poetics of reexamination and the consistent questioning of the nature of most everything. Starting with a delve into the poet’s experience of fluid gender, identity, and self, the work expands to explore protean perspectives of culture, institutions, sex, relationships, self-reflection, and American life, carried by a distinctive and gleeful language-play and stylistics that push the boundaries of connotation and embrace a plurality of meaning.

Mammal posits new ways of understanding ourselves in relationship to our own minds, others, and the natural world. Ever the juicy provocateur, Loranger challenges the reader to consider that “you’re not really you” and that the “I” might be “a mirrored room / we build around ourselves without a door.” This presents a unique nonbinary and trans* transgressive intransigence, exploding thresholds through a hybridized continuum of approaches, inflected with post-Beat neoformalism, spoken word cadences, queer disruption, conceptual audacity, and raucous experimentation.

Loranger construes radical new perspectives on posthumanism. Behold the “stark hubris of the poor enamored beast / flailing its way through the veldt of itself / as if the skin were true.” Interrogating “the id of it all,” we’re upbraided: “Don’t tell me what I am. You’re wrong.” In these pages, conventional conceptions of gender and sexuality melt like ice cream on a hot day as “we slide like pudding into history.” Discover Richard Loranger for yourself with Mammal!