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
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
