Deal

Political and sequined, Deal: New and Selected Poems contains the most memorable of Manns 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, Manns poetry refuses token liberation and reminds us that lifes a cold exercise in looking backback 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 Milks murderer, or a deeply moving pantoum elegizing bullied gay adolescents who committed suicide, formal invention for Mann remains intensely personal. This collectionerotic, mournful, and often satiricalcharacteristically 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.