Randall Mann

One of our leading American practitioners of poetic form and liberating constraint, Randall Mann has confronted what it means to identify as multiracial and queer in urban America for thirty years. Deal: New and Selected Poems harnesses five previous volumes and includes economical yet expansive new works rooted in an age of Wi-Fi, apps, and chat notifications. His newest poems, written in concise, contemporary lines, move us word by word, until we arrive at a stark reality.

Unafraid of that nexus between politics, syntax, and the contradictions of the colloquial, Mann’s poetry refuses “token liberation” and reminds us that life is “a cold exercise in looking back”—to disco and fetish, to a shared gay history, to his childhood Florida or his beloved San Francisco. Whether writing a sestina in the voice of the mortician of the murderer of Harvey Milk, or a deeply moving pantoum elegizing bullied gay adolescents who committed suicide, formal invention for Mann remains intensely personal. This collection—erotic, mournful, and often satirical—characteristically undermines, even as it enlarges, a use of language that continues to fail us.

Timestamped by surprise and exhaustion, and filled with the everyday indignities of being alive, Deal: New and Selected Poems affirms Randall Mann, in the words of Garth Greenwell, as “among our finest, most skillful poets of love and ruin.”

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