Deal: New and Selected Poems

by Randall Mann

Overview

Political and sequined, Deal: New and Selected Poems contains the most memorable of Mann’s previous five collections and presents new poems of disco, lament, and formal invention.

One of our leading American practitioners of poetic form and liberating constraint, Randall Mann has for the past thirty years confronted what it means to identify as multiracial and queer in urban America. 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 the nexus between politics, syntax, and the contradictions of the colloquial, Mann’s poetry refuses “token liberation” and reminds us that “life’s a cold exercise in looking back”—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 Harvey Milk’s murderer, 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 subverts, even as it enlarges, a 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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619322769
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

Deal

The sun sets.

We are all robots.

Market forces.

—Ed Smith

Eating cereal

over the sink,

I think,

this is

what’s real:

the urgent

piss;

the grout

like doubt.

By now,

Anonymous,

no

gent,

is in

his Lyft…

 

Adrift.

This fall,

all

the kids

want

to shoot

vids,

amateur 

auteurs,

little

hard

Godards.

To boot.

Spittle,

my haunt.

 

I want

my hair.

And,

a split,

somewhere

between

mathematics

and tricks

buried

in the yard,

the dream

a multi-level

scheme.

Get

a shovel.

 

I shrivel—

by

bleak

acronym,

boutique

gym,

Commie

leak,

Jimmie

hats,

metallic

antibiotic,

lost

chats

on a hill.

 

A hell

of

passive

investors.

Reboot

love,

with massive

clawback

provisions,

money

dripping off

your robot

back.

The monsters.

My stars.

The Mortician in San Francisco

This may sound queer,

but in 1985 I held the delicate hands

of Dan White:

I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk

was made monument—no, myth—by the years

since he was shot.

 

I remember when Harvey was shot:

twenty, and I knew I was queer.

Those were the years,

Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands

on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk—

elected on the same day as Dan White.

 

I often wonder about Supervisor White,

who fatally shot

Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk,

who was one of us, a Castro queer.

May 21, 1979: a jury hands

down the sentence, seven years—

 

in truth, five years—

for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White,

for the blood on his hands;

when he confessed that he had shot

the mayor and the queer,

a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk?

 

Why cry over spilled milk,

some wondered, semi-privately, for years—

it meant “one less queer.”

The jurors turned to White.

If just the mayor had been shot,

Dan might have had trouble on his hands—

 

but the twelve who held his life in their hands

maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk;

maybe, the second murder offered him a shot

at serving only a few years.

In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White.

And he was made presentable by a queer.

Pantoum

If there is a word in the lexicon of love,

it will not declare itself.

The nature of words is to fail

men who fall in love with men.

 

It will not declare itself,

the perfect word. Boyfriend seems ridiculous:

men who fall in love with men

deserve something a bit more formal.

 

The perfect word? Boyfriend? Ridiculous.

But partner is . . . businesslike—

we deserve something a bit less formal,

much more in love with love.

 

But if partner is businesslike,

then lover suggests only sex,

is too much in love with love.

There is life outside of the bedroom,

 

and lover suggests only sex.

We are left with roommate, or friend.

There is life, but outside of the bedroom.

My friend and I rarely speak of one another.

 

To my left is my roommate, my friend.

If there is a word in the lexicon of love,

my friend and I rarely speak it of one another.

The nature of words is to fail.

Table of Contents

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 

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher