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.