Deal: New and Selected Poems

Randall Mann appeared to emerge fully formed and fully formalist. Few American poets have written so faultlessly in pantoums, villanelles, sestinas, or page-spanning palindromes; even fewer were thirtysomethings debuting in the early 2000s. Emboldened by his guiding influence, Thom Gunn, the young Mann applied traditional forms to novel (but fittingly formalized) subjects: the patterns and poses of gay sociality, “hanky code” and hookup culture, haute couture and exquisite smut. Deal: New and Selected Poems chronicles how Mann progressed from this early work to his most distinctive poems—a paradoxical process, equal parts unbuttoning and self-restraint. Book by book, Mann loosens up, fostering a comfortable distance through persona and caricature, exchanging the autobiography of Randall Mann for ironic portraiture of one randy man: “I lost 2010 // trying to rhyme sext / with sucked, or sacked, // or, that’s it, sect.” Simultaneously, Mann practices writing in shorter and shorter lines, all the while maintaining a nonchalant sonic intricacy. “Rhapsody,” from A Better Life (2021), gathers witty slivers of San Franciscan life, including a snapshot of an ex who majored “in manipulation”:

His existence,
consonants;
the vowels
like bowels,
no movement.
Beat off,
he yelled;
I think
he meant
buzz.
I did. Both.

“Rhapsody” boasts such gabby charisma, such promiscuous punning, that it’s easy to overlook its dashing form: slim-fit sonnets in one- to three-word lines.

Gathering from five previous collections, Deal offers a time-lapse of Mann’s stylistic blossoming. 21 new poems find him experimenting further, repurposing his epigrammatic phrasings for lengthier meditations on “the middle // of life,” a time of “No myth, / only math.” “There is always // the distance / to revise,” the recent poems realize, as Mann reframes earlier desires, “undoing / my own ruin // now.” Where the younger Mann dwelled in fantasy and erotic expectancy, Deal’s title poem prefers post-hookup clarity:

Eating cereal
over the sink,
I think,
this is
what’s real.

Mann’s title suggests midlife’s constraints and compromises: hands we’re dealt, deals we seal. It’s also a no-nonsense imperative—deal with it—to readers of Mann’s assuredly slant oeuvre. “When I said / sorry:” one poem ends, “I’m not sorry.”