A Better Life

"A Better Life is a beautiful book of history taken down to the scale of one." -- Jericho Brown
"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. Mann chronicles and contributes to a queer history that continues to be all too easily forgotten." -- Chen Chen
"From "Mickey Mouse" Florida to Anita Bryant's 1978 San Francisco, poems like "Fifty Years After Stonewall" evoke the changes: "You girl me/ in the virtual/ hallway,/ like a friend / A lover./ Clever/ as this phone." Easy yet startling rhymes propel short lines forward, some one or two words each, while other poems use longer lines and repetitive forms-sestina and pantoum, or loose versions of such-to grapple with obsession, humiliation, and pain." -- Publishers Weekly
"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." -- Foreword Reviews
"One of April's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books" -- Lambda Literary
"A Kenyon Review and multitime Lambda Literary honoree, Randall Mann energetically explores a gay, multiracial identity in A Better Life." -- Library Journal
"During this current pandemic, Randall Mann conjures the ghost of the last one, thereby drawing parallels between the two. Like in the mirroring and repetitive lines of his clever pantoums and palindrome poems, he seems to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same." -- Foglifter