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A Better Life: Poems
From “a writer of breathtaking honesty” (David Ulin, LA Times ), gorgeous new poems that are satirical, open-hearted, and unrepentantly queer. In his poetry, “at once boisterous and lubed, anxious and ambivalent” ( Kenyon Review ), Randall Mann has always had his finger on the pulse of modern life. In his liminal new book of poetry, a gay, multiracial (“they called me yellow in Lexington”) speaker exists in the rift between the “fluorescent rot” of childhood and the “action; / transaction” of a sex-app midlife. The author of Straight Razor and Proprietary , Mann has long been admired for merging raw subject matter with formal ease. A Better Life shows him at the height of his gifts, in the clipped, haunting truth of its rhymes and rhythms.
96 pages, Paperback
Published April 6, 2021
About the author
Randall Mann
11 books41 followersRandall Mann's DEAL: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in May 2023. He is also the author of the following books: A BETTER LIFE (Persea Books, 2021); PROPRIETARY (Persea Books, 2017), finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award; STRAIGHT RAZOR (Persea Books, 2013), a Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; BREAKFAST WITH THOM GUNN (Chicago, 2009), finalist for the California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award; and COMPLAINT IN THE GARDEN (Zoo/Orchises, 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize. In addition, he has written a book of criticism, THE ILLUSION OF INTIMACY: ON POETRY (Diode Editions, 2019). Winner of the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry magazine. Poems and prose in The Adroit Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Lit Hub, The Cortland Review, and The Kenyon Review.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 10, 2021
The word *looking*
means we are looking
dutifully into smart
phones: don't we look smart
in our fleece vests.
Each day an option vests,
our sentence
a declarative sentence:
This is the place.
We know our place.
---from "Everybody Everybody (after Black Box)"
So glad to have found Randall Mann's clever poems and punchy rhymes!
Mann's newest collection of poems, *A Better Life*, asks me to consider the ways of looking and be looked at it within our culture. Mann's focus is on the queer experience and queer history, as he contrasts tearing pages out of *Blue Boy* magazines at a Waldenbooks with the "Action: transaction" of digital encounters today.
The ways we look and are seen may have changed, but the ways poems can help us SEE OURSELVES is eternal. We crop our bodies and faces into boxes all over the Internet in sometimes desperate attempts at intimacy, often never "singing [our] large heart out / warned never to come out." Poems are little boxes, attempts at intimacy, too. But they craft and carve more than crop. Mann's poems are large hearts, singing out.
The slender rhythms and rhymes and repetitions in this collection experiment with enjambment and form (pantouns & palindromes & sonnet fragments) and puzzle out the ways we navigate self, aging, desire, disease, digital experience, and each other. I spent the past two days reading and rereading these poems and getting lost in the spaces within them and between them. I feel like there is still so much space left for me to find new things, and I definitely want to read Mann's earlier work.
means we are looking
dutifully into smart
phones: don't we look smart
in our fleece vests.
Each day an option vests,
our sentence
a declarative sentence:
This is the place.
We know our place.
---from "Everybody Everybody (after Black Box)"
So glad to have found Randall Mann's clever poems and punchy rhymes!
Mann's newest collection of poems, *A Better Life*, asks me to consider the ways of looking and be looked at it within our culture. Mann's focus is on the queer experience and queer history, as he contrasts tearing pages out of *Blue Boy* magazines at a Waldenbooks with the "Action: transaction" of digital encounters today.
The ways we look and are seen may have changed, but the ways poems can help us SEE OURSELVES is eternal. We crop our bodies and faces into boxes all over the Internet in sometimes desperate attempts at intimacy, often never "singing [our] large heart out / warned never to come out." Poems are little boxes, attempts at intimacy, too. But they craft and carve more than crop. Mann's poems are large hearts, singing out.
The slender rhythms and rhymes and repetitions in this collection experiment with enjambment and form (pantouns & palindromes & sonnet fragments) and puzzle out the ways we navigate self, aging, desire, disease, digital experience, and each other. I spent the past two days reading and rereading these poems and getting lost in the spaces within them and between them. I feel like there is still so much space left for me to find new things, and I definitely want to read Mann's earlier work.
July 30, 2022
I really enjoyed this book of formal, sometimes elegaic poems. Though he writes in forms, Mann is so organic in them that it's like he writes a poem and then what he's written becomes a form-- it never feels like he's bent it into shape, just that it was meant to be that way. I'm sure that's not the reality of writing them, but it feels that way.
I thought Mann was younger than me, based on when I first encountered him, but we're the same age-- which made some of the memory poems here weird to read, the depth of experience he claims, of sexuality and the AIDS crisis when I know how relatively sheltered and naive I was. This is a way of saying these poems sometimes feel like they are reported second hand, that he is channeling Thom Gunn or other, older gay men. It's not that it isn't possible for Mann to have had these experiences (though he would been a prodigy in them). It just struck me as odd, and gave an air of simulation to some of the work here.
I am being more critical than I felt, just trying to explain how some of these poems unsettled me. But as a collection, these are lovely and fresh on the page and on re-reading when you see the form the experience of these poems take. I really really enjoyed this book.
I thought Mann was younger than me, based on when I first encountered him, but we're the same age-- which made some of the memory poems here weird to read, the depth of experience he claims, of sexuality and the AIDS crisis when I know how relatively sheltered and naive I was. This is a way of saying these poems sometimes feel like they are reported second hand, that he is channeling Thom Gunn or other, older gay men. It's not that it isn't possible for Mann to have had these experiences (though he would been a prodigy in them). It just struck me as odd, and gave an air of simulation to some of the work here.
I am being more critical than I felt, just trying to explain how some of these poems unsettled me. But as a collection, these are lovely and fresh on the page and on re-reading when you see the form the experience of these poems take. I really really enjoyed this book.
May 8, 2021
In the first and title poem of "A Better Life" (Persea Books, 2021), Randall Mann looks back incredulous at having ever arrived at the age of thirty, a milestone now “fourteen years” in his past. Having survived longer than he might have imagined, Mann laments that thirty seemed old even then, “over the hill” he tells us, since “in queer years, / years are more than.” Thus begins this important collection where Mann, using both free verse and traditional forms, engages us in a type of queer history lesson. No, his feat is bigger than this. In "A Better Life," Mann has perfected the art of time travel, effortlessly jumping backwards from midlife to his teenage years, and then forward again, making poignant stops along the decades between.
May 18, 2021
As always, there's so much to love in Randall's poems - they are alive with rhythm and rhyme, jokes and insights, and above all a good story. I particularly resonate with the poems that take place in/reference/are about San Francisco and its Queerness: not just the people (the Queers) who live there, but the place itself. In Randall's work, the city becomes a complicated character: progressive, dystopic, harsh and punishing, and so beautiful it's hard to look away. I highly recommend, and suggest reading all of Randall's work, from Complaint in the Garden through A Better Life. The poems follow a long and dramatic arc, filled with intimacy and vulnerability and fantasy which make an addictive poetry Soap Opera you will find hard to put down.
Read
January 25, 2022The short line and tight forms felt like reading a taut rubber band as it was being plucked. The poems were fun and serious and felt like they really inhabited their time without becoming overly sentimental. Reading out loud was an absolute pleasure.
December 9, 2021
This one was just not for me. So much sameness. Sorry.
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February 8, 2023Skinny little lines! The word play, the soundsss.
May 14, 2025
Also,
dividing
your time
between
New York
and LA
isn't
liberation.
It's just
fucking work.
dividing
your time
between
New York
and LA
isn't
liberation.
It's just
fucking work.
December 11, 2025
Questionable. Does ensuring others suffer really attain the qualities of a better life?
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews