Deal
Description
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."
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Content
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