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...
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.
Randall Mann is the author of Complaint in the Garden (2004), which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the California Book Award; Straight Razor (2013), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and Proprietary (2017) a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of a book of criticism, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry (2019), as well as co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (2007). He lives in San Francisco.
