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Randall Mann is the author of five books of poetry including Complaint of the Garden, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, Straight Razor, Proprietary, and, most recently, A Better Life. Recipient of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry and the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize awarded by POETRY magazine, Mann is also author of The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry, a book of literary criticism. Mann's poetry has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Asian American Literary Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Paris Review, Poem-A-Day, POETRY, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Three-time finalists for the Lambda Literary Award, Mann's poetry collections have been shortlisted for the California Book Award and Northern California Book Award, and long-listed for the Golden Poppy Awards' Martin Cruz Diversity and Inclusion Award. Mann lives in San Francisco.
Praise for A Better Life A Better Life is a beautiful book of history taken down to the scale of one. Jericho Brown Mann uses his own history to interrogate the experience of American life beyond the cis, white, heteronormative bubble, and he imbues his questions with humor and rhythm. Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword Reviews (5 stars) Sexually witty and existentially hilarious, A Better Life is also deeply elegiac with a rigor a commitment to the music of the line that astonishes. Chen Chen Heart-wrenching. And expert craftsmanship. This is how Mann's poems both pierce and enlarge the heart of the reader. AE Hines, APRPraise for Proprietary Mann thrives on the demands of constraint, the challenge of needing to go deep into a subject to find the rhyme, to maintain the integrity of the line, to render an experience with clarity, control, and concision. Michael Nott, London Magazine [Mann] represents perhaps the best in gay male poetry today, with a message of protest against corporate American life that is as relevant as it is timely. Mann's work should be admired for its ferocity, its craft, and its unabashedly gay point of view. Walter Holland, Lambda Literary Mann is as fearless a poet as I've ever seen. Foglifter Praise for Straight Razor Readers would do well to recognize Mann's place alongside poets like D.A. Powell, Marilyn Hacker, and Anne Sexton. Diego Baez, Booklist Not least among the distinctions of Mann's poems is that they aspire to one of the oldest ambitions of art: to fix the transient moments of our daily lives--in all their banality and beauty, their reverence and ridicule--in enduring forms. Mann is among our finest, most skillful poets of love and ruin. Garth Greenwell, TowleroadPraise for Breakfast with Thom Gunn The clarity startles. Richard Rayner, LA Times These poems are not for the faint of heart. Brent Calderwood, Lambda Literary As Mann demonstrates in these complex, ringing lyrics, love gets even more complicated when whom you love has political implications. Dave Lucas, Cleveland Plain DealerPraise for Complaint in the Garden Mann's Complaint in the Garden quickly asserted itself for its rich idiom, its technical command, its poignant, often overlapping narratives, and its coherence not just as a miscellany but as a real book of poems. --David Baker, Kenyon Review Randall Mann uses strict forms to render the casual, even the casually tragic. In that way he's like the Elizabeth Bishop of 'One Art.' Edmund White
