New Poems
A Walk in the Park
In the Beginning
Deal
Blue
The Summer of 1996
A Step Past Disco
In the Rapid Autumn of Libraries
Days
Wi-Fi
The Past
Double Life
Luck
September
Containment
One Night Stand
The Scene
Tagged
Friday
Poem Beginning with a Line by Wayne Koestenbaum Against Metaphor
The Turn of the Year
from Complaint in the Garden (2004)
?
Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery
Song
Eros
Complaint of the Regular
Complaint of the Lecturer
The Heron
The Revival of Vernacular Architecture
The Shortened History of Florida
The Landscape of Deception
Pantoum
Evidence
Fiduciary
The End of the Last Summer
from Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009)
Early Morning on Market Street
Politics
Queen Christina
The Mortician in San Francisco
Bernal Hill
Ruin
Last Call
The End of Landscape
Syntax
Breakfast with Thom Gunn
Ovid in San Francisco
The Long View
N
Ocean Beach
Translation
Lexington
from Straight Razor (2013)
The Fall of 1992
Straight Razor
Cockroach
My Guidance Counselor
Stable
End Words
September Elegies
Song
Larkin Street
Only You
Teaser
Hyperbole
But Enough About Me
The Lion’s Mouth
Untoward Occurrence at Embassy Suites Poetry Reading American Apparel
from Proprietary (2017)
Proprietary
Nothing
Black Box
Order
Florida
Proximity
Realtor
Halston
Leo & Lance
Perspective
Complaint
Dolores Park
Alphabet Street
Translation
Young Republican
Almost
from A Better Life (2021)
A Better Life
Florida Again
True Blue
Rhapsody
RSVP
Stalking Points
Everybody Everybody
The Lone Palm
Weather
Anecdote of an Ex-
The Summer Before the Student Murders
Long Beach
Beginning and Ending with a Line by Michelle Boisseau Playboy
A New Syntax
New Poems
A Walk in the Park
In the Beginning
Deal
Blue
The Summer of 1996
A Step Past Disco
In the Rapid Autumn of Libraries
Days
Wi-Fi
The Past
Double Life
Luck
September
Containment
One Night Stand
The Scene
Tagged
Friday
Poem Beginning with a Line by Wayne Koestenbaum Against Metaphor
The Turn of the Year
from Complaint in the Garden (2004)
?
Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery
Song
Eros
Complaint of the Regular
Complaint of the Lecturer
The Heron
The Revival of Vernacular Architecture
The Shortened History of Florida
The Landscape of Deception
Pantoum
Evidence
Fiduciary
The End of the Last Summer
from Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009)
Early Morning on Market Street
Politics
Queen Christina
The Mortician in San Francisco
Bernal Hill
Ruin
Last Call
The End of Landscape
Syntax
Breakfast with Thom Gunn
Ovid in San Francisco
The Long View
N
Ocean Beach
Translation
Lexington
from Straight Razor (2013)
The Fall of 1992
Straight Razor
Cockroach
My Guidance Counselor
Stable
End Words
September Elegies
Song
Larkin Street
Only You
Teaser
Hyperbole
But Enough About Me
The Lion’s Mouth
Untoward Occurrence at Embassy Suites Poetry Reading American Apparel
from Proprietary (2017)
Proprietary
Nothing
Black Box
Order
Florida
Proximity
Realtor
Halston
Leo & Lance
Perspective
Complaint
Dolores Park
Alphabet Street
Translation
Young Republican
Almost
from A Better Life (2021)
A Better Life
Florida Again
True Blue
Rhapsody
RSVP
Stalking Points
Everybody Everybody
The Lone Palm
Weather
Anecdote of an Ex-
The Summer Before the Student Murders
Long Beach
Beginning and Ending with a Line by Michelle Boisseau Playboy
A New Syntax
New Poems
A Walk in the Park
In the Beginning
Deal
Blue
The Summer of 1996
A Step Past Disco
In the Rapid Autumn of Libraries
Days
Wi-Fi
The Past
Double Life
Luck
September
Containment
One Night Stand
The Scene
Tagged
Friday
Poem Beginning with a Line by Wayne Koestenbaum Against Metaphor
The Turn of the Year
from Complaint in the Garden (2004)
?
Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery
Song
Eros
Complaint of the Regular
Complaint of the Lecturer
The Heron
The Revival of Vernacular Architecture
The Shortened History of Florida
The Landscape of Deception
Pantoum
Evidence
Fiduciary
The End of the Last Summer
from Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009)
Early Morning on Market Street
Politics
Queen Christina
The Mortician in San Francisco
Bernal Hill
Ruin
Last Call
The End of Landscape
Syntax
Breakfast with Thom Gunn
Ovid in San Francisco
The Long View
N
Ocean Beach
Translation
Lexington
from Straight Razor (2013)
The Fall of 1992
Straight Razor
Cockroach
My Guidance Counselor
Stable
End Words
September Elegies
Song
Larkin Street
Only You
Teaser
Hyperbole
But Enough About Me
The Lion’s Mouth
Untoward Occurrence at Embassy Suites Poetry Reading American Apparel
from Proprietary (2017)
Proprietary
Nothing
Black Box
Order
Florida
Proximity
Realtor
Halston
Leo & Lance
Perspective
Complaint
Dolores Park
Alphabet Street
Translation
Young Republican
Almost
from A Better Life (2021)
A Better Life
Florida Again
True Blue
Rhapsody
RSVP
Stalking Points
Everybody Everybody
The Lone Palm
Weather
Anecdote of an Ex-
The Summer Before the Student Murders
Long Beach
Beginning and Ending with a Line by Michelle Boisseau Playboy
A New Syntax
Randall Mann is the author of five books of poetry including Complaint of the Garden, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, Straight Razor, Proprietary, and, most recently, A Better Life. Recipient of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry and the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize awarded by POETRY magazine, Mann is also author of The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry, a book of literary criticism. Mann's poetry has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Asian American Literary Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Paris Review, Poem-A-Day, POETRY, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Three-time finalists for the Lambda Literary Award, Mann's poetry collections have been shortlisted for the California Book Award and Northern California Book Award, and long-listed for the Golden Poppy Awards' Martin Cruz Diversity and Inclusion Award. Mann lives in San Francisco.
Praise for Deal: New and Selected Poems “Mann's poetic output for
the past two decades has proven consistently provocative and
rewarding, and this collection provides an excellent overview of
the work of an exceedingly fine poet.”—Diego Báez,Booklist, STARRED
REVIEW
“It’s an event: Randall Mann’s work is now gathered in Deal: New
and Selected, a volume of poems as rich as they are chiseled. . . .
His poems have a pulsing beauty, sometimes driving, sometimes
graceful with the poised supple rigidity of a ballet dancer.”—Jesse
Nathan, McSweeney's “Few American poets have written so faultlessly
in pantoums, villanelles, sestinas, or page-spanning palindromes;
even fewer were thirtysomethings debuting in the early 2000s.
Emboldened by his guiding influence, Thom Gunn, the young Mann
applied traditional forms to novel (but fittingly formalized)
subjects: the patterns and poses of gay sociality, ‘hanky code’ and
hookup culture, haute couture and exquisite smut. Deal: New and
Selected Poems chronicles how Mann progressed from this early work
to his most distinctive poems—a paradoxical process, equal parts
unbuttoning and self-restraint. Book by book, Mann loosens up,
fostering a comfortable distance through persona and caricature,
exchanging the autobiography of Randall Mann for ironic portraiture
of one randy man.”—Christopher Spaide, Harriet Books at the Poetry
Foundation “Deal works equally well as a retrospective or an
introduction to Mann’s work, where in the table of contents alone,
poem titles accrue and cohere across time, as full of repetition
and turns as a Randall Mann poem. . . . Mann is a poet of both
place and displacement, but perhaps more accurately, he is a poet
of landscape—of physical landscapes, but also cultural ones: queer
life, the world of poetry, and language itself.”—Morgan English, On
the Seawall “While Deal continues Mann’s explorations of love,
desire, identity, and the complexities of queer
experience—hallmarks of his poetic repertoire, it is his meticulous
attention to detail and command of poetic form that truly
distinguishes his work in this collection. Mann’s verses resonate
with emotional depth and intellectual acuity, carrying a weight
that leaves a lasting impact on the reader.”—Zyzzyva “As Mann has
developed, his poems have grown increasingly svelte, to the degree
that the reader of Deal—which fronts the new work—will encounter
ballads whittled down to dimeter, threads of lyric a single
syllable wide. It’s a narrow world, but Mann pushes it,
virtuosically, in any number of directions. . . . Reading through
the achievement of Deal, one can’t help but be struck by the many
poems addressed to queer poets, from D.A. Powell to David Trinidad,
and by the queer icons celebrated and mourned: Rock Hudson, Leo and
Lance. The book, a crosscut of one poet’s history, offers itself as
also a web of horizontal affiliation and care, in which
influence—erotic, poetic—moves slantwise and unpredictably. It’s a
sexy club, and we’re invited.”—Noah Warren, Adroit “Mann has been
quietly, movingly adding poem after memorable poem to the queer
canon for three decades; anyone who cares about poetry should read
Deal.”—The Cortland Review “I am fascinated by where Mann’s poetry
is going by combining three features: the very short line, freer or
less systematic use of rhymes, and increasingly enigmatic meanings.
The short lines foreground the rhyme when in close proximity—get
punchy—but also, when separated by a run of unrhymed lines, echo
one another more faintly while still stitching the meanings
together. It takes confidence to write like this, because, if not
done well, it can lose sense, become a too-enigmatic series of
blips, as sometimes occurs here. For a poet such as Mann, who likes
to combine the confessional with the allusive, the colloquial with
the highly literary, the brutally self-honest with the humorous, it
can work. This is part of what is seductive about Mann’s
poetry.”—Jeff Franklin,Birmingham Poetry Review “Mann has adapted a
phantasmagorical, Baudelairean ethos to suit a
twenty-first-century, queer, US-American context.”—Brian
Brodeur,Literary Matters “Mann’s astonishing lyric gifts, his
formal and musical rigor and play, and his honest, vibrant
voice.”—Colin Cheny and Cate Marvin, Holy Gossip
Praise for Randall Mann “A Better Life is a beautiful book of
history taken down to the scale of one.”―Jericho Brown “Mann uses
his own history to interrogate the experience of American life
beyond the cis, white, heteronormative bubble, and he imbues his
questions with humor and rhythm.”―Foreword Reviews (5 stars)
“Sexually witty and existentially hilarious, A Better Life is also
deeply elegiac with a rigor―a commitment to the music of the
line―that astonishes.”―Chen Chen “Heart-wrenching. And expert
craftsmanship. This is how Mann’s poems both pierce and enlarge the
heart of the reader.”―APR “Mann thrives on the demands of
constraint, the challenge of needing to go deep into a subject to
find the rhyme, to maintain the integrity of the line, to render an
experience with clarity, control, and concision.”―London Magazine
“[Mann] represents perhaps the best in gay male poetry today, with
a message of protest against corporate American life that is as
relevant as it is timely. Mann’s work should be admired for its
ferocity, its craft, and its unabashedly gay point of view.”―Lambda
Literary “Mann is as fearless a poet as I’ve ever seen.”―Foglifter
“Readers would do well to recognize Mann’s place alongside poets
like D.A. Powell, Marilyn Hacker, and Anne Sexton.”―Booklist “Not
least among the distinctions of Mann’s poems is that they aspire to
one of the oldest ambitions of art: to fix the transient moments of
our daily lives—in all their banality and beauty, their reverence
and ridicule—in enduring forms. Mann is among our finest, most
skillful poets of love and ruin.”―Garth Greenwell, Towleroad “The
clarity startles.”―LA Times “These poems are not for the faint of
heart.”―Lambda Literary “As Mann demonstrates in these complex,
ringing lyrics, love gets even more complicated when whom you love
has political implications.”―Cleveland Plain Dealer “Mann’s
Complaint in the Garden quickly asserted itself for its rich idiom,
its technical command, its poignant, often overlapping narratives,
and its coherence not just as a miscellany but as a real book of
poems.”—Kenyon Review “Randall Mann uses strict forms to render the
casual, even the casually tragic. In that way he’s like the
Elizabeth Bishop of ‘One Art.’”―Edmund White
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